What Does Preserving Digital Art Involve?

Each year on the first Thursday of November, the Digital Preservation Coalition and networks around the world mark World Digital Preservation Dayhttps://www.dpconline.org/events/world-digital-preservation-day, drawing attention to the digital records, research, memories, and cultural assets that shape our communities.

This year, the theme is "Save our Stories (SOS): Our digital heritage in danger" calls for action before these are lost. Like other international days, it is a reminder that digital preservation is a shared, ongoing responsibility. For digital art, the stories at risk are the artworks themselves. Preserving them is a multi-pronged task and means understanding what the work requires in order to run, look, and behave as the artist intended, and keeping those conditions available over time.

"Digital preservation plays an important role in both the art world and the archival sector. Both fields face similar challenges, such as obsolete file formats, reliance on specific hardware, and the need to maintain original context and functionality. In the case of digital art, the mode of presentation, the artist’s intention, and the experience of the viewer or participant also plays a significant role. Digital art is at the forefront of digital creativity and digital preservation." – Gaby Wijers, director of LI-MA,

From Day-to-Day Practice to Innovation

Saving a file is only one step. We also record how each work is meant to look and behave, and what it needs to run, wherever possible together with the artist. For works made with software, we keep a full copy of the computer setup and the code, and can take over the hosting if needed.

Every digital artwork is checked on arrival and turned into a stable master copy, from which exhibition and online versions can be made. Old videotapes are digitised without any loss of quality. Our digital repository, used by more than 50 collections, keeps two copies in separate locations and a third as backup, and checks them continuously. Original tapes, computers and other carriers are stored in a climate-controlled vault.

No single method suits every work digital art preservation is tailor made preservation LI-MA assesses each artwork individually and advises the approach that fits it: storage, migration, digitisation, emulation, documentation, and, within specific projects, reinterpretation.

Beyond caring for works directly, LI-MA supports, connects and inspires artists, institutions and students, passing on the agency and critical thinking needed to approach preservation and new technologies themselves.

Net art relies on servers, browsers, plug-ins and domain registrations that change or expire. Net art relies on servers, browsers, plug-ins and domain registrations that change or expire. Through ArtHost, developed n collaboration with artist Constant Dullaart’s DullTech, we host online artworks on individual virtual machines and store their source code on LTO tape. If you want to know more the specific challenges net art faces check the video Who Cares for Net Art?, which we released, in 2024, to mark World Digital Preservation Day.

The Collaborative Infrastructure for Sustainable Access to Digital Art project (2021-2024) brought LI-MA together with 15 Dutch museums and collections to develop shared methods for keeping complex digital artworks accessible. Other research follows specific technologies: through AMIGA NU, artists can have Amiga floppy disks digitised as disk images and their files emulated, so the work can be seen without the original hardware.

Collaborative case studies are at the heart of our research. Each one teaches us something that applies more widely. By studying one work closely, we draw out questions and solutions that inform our care for VR, NFTs and other new formats, and we share the resulting tools publicly, among them the Internet Art Questionnaire.

Working Together to Preserve and Present Dutch Digital Art

Museums, artists, and corporate and private collectors entrust LI-MA with part or all of their media art collections, among them the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Van Abbemuseum, the Bonnefanten, and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE).

This work already began in the early 1990s, when our predecessor MonteVideo/TBA/NIMk started preserving video works with Dutch museums, in collaboration with the Rijksdienst and the Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (SBHK). Preserving media artworks is essential to ensure they remain accessible for future generations and can continue to be experienced in new contexts. Many pioneering digital and media art pieces require careful conservation before they can be exhibited again, due to the rapid evolution of technology and the fragility of original materials.

With the Digital Canon, LI-MA and partners selected 20 works with a lasting influence on digital art and culture in the Netherlands, the_living among them. Many had to be preserved before they could be shown in the exhibition REBOOT. Pioneering Digital Art at Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam (2023-2024), work carried out with the artists under the title Digital Care. These partners make the work possible: their collections hold the artworks, and their questions set much of the agenda for our research.

Earlier in 2026, the exhibition Pioneers of Media Art. The First Years of MonteVideo at Nxt Museum returned seminal experiments in media art and archival material to public view, the first of a series of exhibitions that bring the MonteVideo archive into dialogue with digital art today.

Collaborating Internationally and Developing New Insights

Media art has always circulated across borders. Obsolete technology, scattered expertise, a lack of a unified framework and vocabulary, and uneven resources affect collections throughout Europe, smaller institutions most of all. Our international work concentrates on sharing what partners learn, so that no institution has to solve these problems alone, offering shared methodologies and tested approaches to problems. To be able to develop and promote digital art preservation awareness and skills of artists and museum professionals, to explore new ways of documentation and preservation, and to institutions, from AI-assisted documentation to the legal questions around software-based art. LI-MA is a leading partner in several international initiatives for media and born-digital art conservation. In EMBARK, a European network of experts, LI-MA is a core partner and hosted the first general meeting in Amsterdam. Through ArcaiArt, LI-MA explores responsible AI-driven documentation and conservation, organising workshops comparing their collection with REWIND Artists’ Video in Dundee. In the CUSP project, led by the National Gallery of Iceland, LI-MA helps guide media artworks from creation to storage, with a special focus on emergency support for at-risk collections in Ukraine, sharing its expertise in time-based media conservation.

Methods tested internationally feed into the care we provide to artists and collections in the Netherlands, and likewise what we have learned from decades of case work travels outward through the same networks. With its expertise, LI-MA ensures that the practical realities of unstable software, rapid hardware obsolescence, and artistic intent are properly institutionalised across European museums.

In the field of media art and digital art, we are generally not dealing with massive quantities. The infrastructure is flexible and designed for bespoke solutions – it’s a different approach. Digital art sits at the forefront of digital creativity, serving as an ideal laboratory for testing and improving the preservation, sustainability, and reproducibility of digital heritage. Through collaboration, we can learn a great deal from one another.

Looking Ahead: Keeping Digital Art Accessible for Future Generations

Preserving digital art requires ongoing care, research and collaboration. By combining practical preservation work with innovation and knowledge sharing, LI-MA works with artists, institutions and international partners to ensure that digital art including new forms such as VR, NFTs, and AI-driven works, remains accessible for future generations. Long-term care also needs long-term support: together with the Dutch museums and SBHK, we are working towards inclusion in the Cultural Basic Infrastructure (BIS) from 2029.

In 2027, the 11th edition of Transformation Digital Art, LI-MA's annual symposium for the preservation of digital art, takes place on 4 and 5 March. Under the theme EMBODIED – Knowledge, Experience, Data, it asks how the experience of a work can be documented and passed on once its original technology is gone. World Digital Preservation Day is a reminder that this responsibility is ongoing, and shared.

Do you hold digital or media artworks and have questions about their care? Get in touch with LI-MA.

Header: Roger Cremers