A plain text description of how an installation works may be useful not to lose the memory of the work completely, but it’s hardly searchable, not so much because we can’t search for words in a text, but because concepts are not organized in a structured way that the system can operate with, i.e. semantic operations are not possible. Due to its influence on other art forms as well as on the contemporary culture, the evolution of interactive art may be considered as important as the evolution of opera in the XVII century. That is why the work of structuring this type of information is important: it can be a preliminary step to understanding what actually happens in the process of interaction, but it can be an effective way to describe how interaction looks like (understanding vs. description), and prevent the loss of today’s vast artistic production, with an impact that goes well beyond the artistic domain. This project has been concerned with defining a way to produce optimal metadata for interactive art, in order to facilitate the archiving, access and re-purposing of interactive artworks. In practical terms, it has theorized the possibility to submit queries such as “show me all the [interactive] installations that use full body movement”, “show me all the installations that use upper body movement to control a sonic output” o “show me all the installations that require the use to move his/her right arm to trigger a sonic and light output”. Such system did not exist to date and it is, in a way, the translation of the concept of “query by content” already studied in music, where songs (to pick a narrow but clear example) cannot just be retrieved by extra-musical features like title and author, but also by intrinsically musical features like tonality, melody fragments, etc. Interaction is obviously a key aspect of interactive art, therefore it is about time that we can adequately store and most importantly retrieve these works by features that intrinsically relate to interaction and not only author (name of the artist), year of production, etc. The importance and scope of this work will reveal itself more in a decade from now and further down the road, when contemporary modes of interaction and the technology used to detect, process, and display information will have evolved. With the rapid pace at which new technology is released on the market, it is only reasonable to assume that the landscape of interactive art will look like a completely different world from now, especially with the very interesting experimentation currently going on with mixed reality.
