From 2017 to 2021, LI-MA’s Cultural Matter programme created a platform for investigating the preservation, presentation, and interpretation of digital art. Through artist-centred exhibitions, live talks, and hybrid formats, it addressed urgent questions about materiality, visibility, and care, bridging technological change with human connection and long-term cultural relevance.
12½ Years LI-MA: From Code to Conversation – Cultural Matter
How digital artworks live on
How can digital artworks remain meaningful and accessible beyond their original technological moment?
This was the animating question behind Cultural Matter, LI-MA’s long-running public programme that unfolded from 2017 to 2021. Conceived as a space for inquiry, Cultural Matter addressed the evolving challenges of presenting, conserving, and interpreting digital artworks. At its heart was a recognition: that digital art is not just about code or tools, but about people – artists, curators, audiences – coming together to reflect on the shifting material and conceptual frameworks of contemporary media culture.
Each edition focused on the work of a single artist or collective, brought to life through exhibitions, lectures, screenings, and in-depth discussions. In doing so, the programme provided room to think deeply about themes like online identity, algorithmic aesthetics, digital folklore, and the (visible and invisible) architectures that shape the web. It positioned digital art not as a novelty but as a practice rich with history, politics, and emotion.
Cultural Matter: Martine Neddam.
Unfolding Formats: Physical, Digital, Hybrid
In its early years, Cultural Matter operated from LI-MA’s small and idiosyncratic exhibition space: a narrow corridor of brick walls adjacent to its offices in Amsterdam. While modest in scale, the site challenged artists to think playfully and adaptively: how to bring screen-based work into physical space, how to retranslate immaterial code into embodied experience. These were questions artists embraced, resulting in immersive, inventive installations.
Artist Martine Neddam, known for her iconic internet persona Mouchette, recalled her experience with Cultural Matter in early 2020:
“LI-MA understood from the beginning that digital art was made by humans for humans, and that they needed to meet in real life in order to make it and preserve it. As an artist, I create and interact alone behind a screen all day, so I treasure the possibility of meeting like-minded people in the flesh – and this is what LI-MA offered me so often.”
– Martine Neddam, internet artist
As the COVID-19 pandemic transformed public life, Cultural Matter too adapted. Online formats were developed to sustain engagement, including the multichannel presentation of Rafaël Rozendaal’s websites – a prototype for how net art could be re-contextualised and curated across screens. Remote discussions with artists such as Heath Bunting, Joan Heemskerk, and Lyubov Matyunina invited global audiences into shared reflection. Rather than simply replicate offline events online, LI-MA explored new modes of liveness, intimacy, and participation across platforms.
Cultural Matter: Martine Neddam.
Collective Inquiry, Lasting Impact
“I had a show in February 2020, just before the pandemic hit. It was a rare opportunity to present Madja Edelstein-Gomez, a new virtual character that hadn’t yet found a public. Together with the LI-MA team, we made a large-scale, immersive projection that beautifully inhabited the brick corridor space. The opening was full, the discussion exciting. [...]
But then COVID came. The venue closed. The symposium went online. No one else saw the show. Years later, this virtual character Madja Edelstein-Gomez has disappeared from online, rest only an archive of her artistic activity, and the best photos and documents are the views of the projection inside the brick wall corridor of the show at LI-MA. It was actually the best moment of contact with a live audience, even it was short-lived, that is what the archive remembers."
– Martine Neddam, internet artist
Throughout its five-year run, Cultural Matter stayed true to LI-MA’s ethos: fostering collective inquiry, foregrounding the material conditions of digital art, and centering care in both its physical and digital forms. Many of the works shown had never before been exhibited in the Netherlands. Each edition was developed in close dialogue with the artists themselves, ensuring that presentations were contextually grounded and conceptually rich.
Digital art requires more than technological upkeep; it needs community, conversation, and occasions for shared attention. In that way, Cultural Matter bridged the ephemeral and the enduring, turning code into connection, and conversation into legacy.
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Header image: Cultural Matter: Martine Neddam.
