features at all, but rather lie outside
the materiality of the object.
Brenda Laurel suggests that interactivity can be thought of as sitting on
the three axes, of ‘frequency’, ‘range’,
and ‘significance’.
3 Frequency represents the number of occasions on
which the user interacts with the
computer. Range represents the
number of distinct choices that are
available, while significance represents the degree to which the choices
made by the user alters the outcome.
Thus: “A not-so interactive computer game judged by these standards
would only let you do something once
in a while, only give you a few things
to choose from, and the things you
could choose wouldn’t make much
difference to the whole action (or produce significant changes to the state
of the underlying system). A very interactive computer game (or desktop
or flight simulator) would let you do
something that really mattered at any
time, and it could be anything you
could think of.”
3
As we reflect on the complexities of
preserving the key characteristics of
artifacts with a high degree of meaningful interactivity, it becomes clear
that interaction gives the operation of
computers a certain degree of ephemerality, and variability, which in turn
produces highly individualized, and
potentially unique, behaviors in computer systems. Thus, the behavior of
computers may well be impossible to
reproduce in full on subsequent occasions, even supposing the software
designer/author were motivated to
do so. Laurel characterizes the operation of computers as ‘performative’
2
and comparable to theatre. So just as
no two performances in a theater are
(or can be) exactly alike, computer
systems whose core behaviors are dependent on the variable input of users may also be unique. The degree
to which this is actually so in practice
depends crucially on the sort of interaction the computer system in question permits.
In many cases it is more sensible to
think of software in terms of what it
does, rather than in terms of the lines
of code that constitute a program, or
the hardware on which the software
runs. Construed this way, the hu-
man component of human-computer
formation which publically and freely
available. However, as one begins to
engage seriously with preservation is-
sues, it does not take long to come up
against problems that are much more
difficult to address, and which are in-
creasingly common.
I have recently been concerned by
the preservation challenges presented
when dealing with interactivity and
ephemerality. The drive toward providing ever more complex and nuanced
forms of computer interactivity is not
new. Indeed, it has been around right
from the earliest days of computing,
Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad represented a significant early step, and Sutherland is usually now remembered as the
founding father in computer interaction. The history can be traced through
Doug Engelbart’s visionary effort during the 1950s to “augment the human
intellect” by making available a vast
amount of human knowledge via highly responsive workstations. Engelbart’s
so-called NLS (oNLine System), which
was developed courtesy of an ARPA
grant facilitated by Sutherland (
working under the direction of J.C.R. Licklider), was first demonstrated in 1968 in
what came to be called the “Mother of
All Demos.”a This remarkable event featured the introduction of the computer
mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing,
hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a
collaborative real-time editor.
During the 1970s, Apple did a great
deal of work to move interactivity
technology out of the laboratory into
the living room, and today the ideas
put forward by Licklider, Sutherland,
and Engelbart are considered commonplace. Development continues
of course, and Virtual Reality systems
are just a recent manifestation of the
increasingly sophisticated ways we are
able to interact with computers.
From the perspective of the arts, Oliver Grau1 has argued that the development of what he calls ‘illusionary visual
space’ is part of the overall art history
of illusion and immersion, and draws
connections with interactive art, interface design, agents, telepresence, and
image evolution.
a Ten clips from the Mother of All Demos are
available at http://bit.ly/2epzIs2.
The existence of complex interactivity affordances in modern computer
systems has a significant impact on
how we think, and can think about
computers, and this in turn has consequences for our conception of what we
are trying to preserve and later make
accessible for future generations.
Among computer scientists, the
tendency has traditionally been to
concentrate on the tangible or the
physical.b Thus, preserving (say) the
financial records of a company would
typically be treated as a series of tasks
involving ensuring the bits that comprise the company accounts package
and its associated data are saved on
a stable medium, and stored in a safe
place. These in turn would need to be
periodically updated to run on new
generations of hardware when they
become available (migration) or might
subject to virtualization or emulation.
While the implied processes of careful
analysis, storage, preservation management, and access provision, usually work well for financial systems and
text documents, they serve us much
less well when human-computer interaction offers users the opportunity
to influence fundamentally the performance of software. Grau’s notion of illusionary visual space draws attention
to the fact that sometimes the most
significant features of an object, and
those that we would be the most concerned to preserve, are not tangible
b Jerry McDonough has written a number of
pieces showing how preservation of bits is in
many ways the least difficult of the preservation challenges before us. See, for example,
McDonough.
5
The drive toward
providing ever
more complex
and nuanced
forms of computer
interactivity
is not new.