Documenting mixed reality performance: the case of CloudPad

This article introduces an original documentation and archiving tool, CloudPad, that integrates ‘cloud computing’ into the annotation and synchronisation of mixed media resources. Through CloudPad users are able to view a documentation, edit a version of it, and record their own comments in response to it. Whether users may have created and/or experienced a particular work, or whether they may simply wish to consult a work's documentation, their journey through these records and annotations are subsumed into the work's documentation, thus augmenting the ‘original’ artwork's field of social engagement. Before discussing CloudPad in detail, we proceed to explain how recent debates in performance documentation influenced our methodology and development, and the general challenges of mixed reality documentation that CloudPad aims to address.