The Role of Interactive New‐Media Arts Applications in Managing Knowledge in the Public Domain

ABSTRACT

Interactive new media arts (INMA) are technologically oriented artistic practices that share with knowledge management (KM) a concern for managing data, information, and knowledge (DIK). Despite this overlap, KM has largely overlooked INMA's practices—a gap compounded by the absence of a KM framework addressing INMA's contributions to KM in the public domain. Drawing on three interconnected theories, this review proposes a KM framework that examines how INMA applications' organizational interactions manage DIK across generative, participatory, and integrative management contexts. The framework is structural rather than normative: it identifies the operational conditions under which INMA manages DIK, not whether those outcomes are epistemically superior. A PRISMA‐guided analysis of 239 INMA studies (2000–2024) examined these contexts to characterize how INMA broadens KM in the public domain. The analysis shows that INMA's organizational interactions create dialogues between explicit and tacit DIK in the generative context and amplify them through expanding interactions in the participatory and integrative contexts. These operations consolidate into three aligned triads: tiers of interaction (passive, retroactive, and active), knowledge outcomes (receptive, dialogic, and co‐constitutive), and DIK relationship models (separate, interconnected, and unified). Synthesizing across the models yields a paradigm in which the active tier corresponds to the unified model to produce co‐constitutive knowledge—the configuration most capable of extending KM into open, public settings, yet the least frequently realized in the corpus. Compared with traditional KM, the paradigm characterizes INMA's distinctive approach to open DIK acquisition, flow, and codification and outlines the associated benefits and challenges.