interactives: a fuzzy set in a post-broadcasting era
“Workaday life under a fuzzy set charge is life in the fast lane.” (Lerner and Wanat,1983: 504-505)
Complex digital objects, net-art, born-digital art, variable media, ephemeral work, new media art, occurent art, behaviourist art, time-based media art, interactives… A random selection of terms that refer to similar or overlapping phenomena, each portraying their own strengths and weaknesses.
What each of these terms have in common is that they still cover a wide array of works. They lack specificity and therefore do not hold as a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive categorization. What this illustrates is that what we are dealing with here can best be described as a ‘fuzzy set’, a term from mathematics to refer to a set whose elements have only a degree of membership. It can be differentiated from a ‘crisp set’ or a well defined set. For example: a collection that exists out of productions from Dutch public broadcasters represents a crisp set, just as all productions distributed through the medium television. The interactives here discussed encompass games, websites, interactive television, fiction, non-fiction, educational material, marketing campaigns, CD-roms, applications for tabblets, etc. They cannot be categorized in a uniform and final manner and therefore present us with a fuzzy set (Lerner and Wanat, 1983). This is also what professor emeritus John Mackenzie Owen argues when he writes that “it is no longer possible to classify heritage materials in a limited number of distinct media, types and genres: in the digital world these exist in multiple and changing combinations (2007: 47).”
For audio-visual archives, simply adding a media-type (new media or e-culture) to their collection is not enough. The post-broadcasting era is well upon us and it will soon affect all cultural expressions. A far more radical reorientation is needed if cultural heritage institutions are to capture and secure these expressions: new workflows, different personel requirements, new flexible systems.
Archiving Interactives 