Harwood, Co-curated Digital Culture: Machinima © ISAST 1 Co-curated Digital Culture: Machinima Tracy Harwood Senior Research Fellow Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH tharwood@dmu.ac.uk © ISAST Manuscript received 5 October 2015 Abstract This paper explores hybrid curatorial practices that have developed around digital “socio-techno-cultural” practices such as machinima. Machinima is a creative cultural movement that has evolved considerably since its emergence in 1996. The article highlights interrelated themes of curatorial practice: co-evolving sense-making and social consumption; creative cognition and exploratory visualization; technologies as cultural intermediary; social products, materialized expression and collective memory; capturing contexts through co-curation; and, sustainability and stability of cultural capital. The article concludes that curation is a process of continually evolving interpretation of the artefact, representing shifts in the technology landscape, network of community members and audience interactions. Introduction This article summarizes research that has explored some of the pertinent issues in digital curation of machinima as an important cultural movement, empirically investigating perspectives and methods of curatorial practices among professional digital arts and creator communities. Machinima is a form of original creative content, generated using recordings and edits of 3D computer gameplay [1]. It is a game-related cultural practice that emerged in the mid 1990s and, within digital arts, is now widely recognized as a genre of appropriation. Since the first short film, recognized by the community to be Diary of a Camper [2], there have been tens of thousands of machinimas (“machine-animation- cinema” films) produced and released via a range of online streaming services. The collective experience of machinima culture has emerged through technology-mediated environments, including specialist and generic social networking services such as YouTube, Vimeo, TwitchTV and Machinima TM . There is, however, limited recognition of the phenomenon as distinctive form of cultural heritage by firms (organizations) holding content, intimating unstable and unsustainable access to materials, with only limited and ad hoc preservation by professional curators associated with contemporary media art museums and galleries. This is not least because there is limited institutional development of approaches that present, collect, document and preserve new media arts [3] [4]. Yet, as Dale [5] argues, online spaces hold a wealth of information that requires new competencies and skillsets in content curation among both professional and creator communities to realize its value as cultural heritage. Leonardo Just Accepted MS. doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01328 © ISAST