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Learning
Reference entries on the concepts of Live Art Documentation — the discipline’s own terms, and the stage and preservation vocabulary around them. Every entry opens with its definition, stays in plain terms, cites sources where they exist, and carries a visible revision note. An encyclopedia that versions its own entries is the method, demonstrated in public.
Fifteen entries at launch. The set grows with real work, never ahead of it.
THE DISCIPLINE
Live Art Documentation
Live Art Documentation is the documentation and preservation of live and spatial work — performance, installation, scenography, lighting design, exhibition curation — as cultural heritage, practiced with the sensibilities of the disciplines that create it.
The full arc
The full arc is engagement with a work’s documentation from its first concept research to its long-term preservation.
Legibility
Legibility is the property of being understandable to inheritors without the maker present.
THE STAGE AND THE SPACE
Lighting state
A lighting state is the complete configuration of light in a performance space at a given moment — the composed picture, not the individual instruments that produce it.
Cue
A cue is the instruction that moves a live work from one state to the next — the atomic unit of a performance’s behavior.
Color temperature
Color temperature describes the warmth or coolness of nominally white light, stated in kelvin.
Scenography
Scenography is the design of the performance space as a whole — set, light, costume, and sound composed together, in spatial relationship with the work and its audience.
Exhibition documentation
Exhibition documentation is the record of a curated spatial work — what was shown, how it was arranged, lit, and encountered — made so the exhibition can be studied or restaged after it closes.
THE PRESERVATION STACK
Preservation master
A preservation master is the highest-quality, standards-conformant copy of a recording — the file from which every other copy derives, held with complete metadata and rights documentation.
Archival package
An archival package is a structured, self-describing set of files, metadata, and rights records prepared for long-term keeping.
OAIS
OAIS — the Open Archival Information System, ISO 14721 — is the international reference model for how an archive takes information in, preserves it, and serves it to a future public.
As-built
As-built documentation records a work as it finally existed — as distinct from the work as it was designed, quoted, or imagined.
BIM
Building Information Modeling — BIM — is the making of data-rich three-dimensional models under disciplined information management, framed internationally by the ISO 19650 series.
Rights documentation
Rights documentation is the recorded chain of permissions from every rights-bearing contributor to a work, kept in step with capture and stored with the material it governs.
Intangible cultural heritage
Intangible cultural heritage is living cultural practice — the performing arts among its named domains — recognized and safeguarded under UNESCO’s 2003 Convention.