The 10th anniversary edition of Transformation Digital Art 2026 brought together artists, researchers, museums, archives, and other heritage practices and institutions,to reflect on how digital art is preserved, understood, and transmitted within rapidly evolving technological and cultural contexts. Across both days, a shared position emerged: digital art preservation is not only technical, but relational, distributed, and ongoing. Within this landscape, LI-MA’s role as an expertise centre is both infrastructural and connective, supporting long-term access to media art while initiating, facilitating, and actively participating in collaboration, research, and knowledge exchange across the field.

We were very happy to have welcomed guests from 3 continents and 20 countries, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States. I want to thank you all for your active participation.

The symposium opened with a keynote by Sarah Friend, who framed digital systems through the lens of mortality. By understanding online environments as “worlds” that inevitably come to an end, she positioned their disappearance as a gradual, collective process rather than a single event. This perspective set the tone for a programme that repeatedly returned to questions of continuity, responsibility, and what it means to sustain digital culture over time.

Day 1 – Collaboration, Care, and Institutional Shifts

The first day centred on collaborative and relational approaches to preservation. In the opening panel, Kelani Nichole, Tereza Havlíková, Sakrowski, and Ronny Heiremans presented decentralised and community-driven models that move beyond institutional dependency. Preservation was framed as an active and collective process – less about stabilising objects and more about sustaining relationships, reactivation, and shared responsibility.

This perspective extended into the second panel, where Brian Castriota and Hélia Marçal introduced refusal as a form of care, while Flaminia Fortunato and Chiara Borgonovo emphasised dialogue, trust, and emotional intelligence. Inge Hinterwaldner and Annet Dekker highlighted how interpretive frameworks shape how works remain legible over time. Across these contributions, preservation emerged as a negotiated practice shaped by ethics, care, and human interaction.

The day concluded with a discussion on new collaborative initiatives, featuring Aga Wielocha, Patricia Falcão, Esther Moñivas Mayor, and Paula Fernández Valdés. While institutions remain central in providing visibility and resources, the panel highlighted their limitations in supporting experimental practices. The notion of “networks of care” emerged as an alternative – distributed, collaborative systems that include artists, technologies, and communities, and that challenge centralised control over cultural memory. The day closed with Jonas Lund, whose work Network Maintenance reflected on collective ownership and responsibility within decentralised systems.

Day 2 – Data, Access, and Emerging Infrastructures

The second day opened with a keynote by Amira Gad, who challenged institutions to rethink digital art as a condition rather than an object. She argued for a shift toward understanding digital art as intangible heritage, where continuity, context, and transmission take precedence over stability. This approach aligns with LI-MA’s ongoing work in supporting not only artworks, but the ecosystems that sustain them.

The first panel addressed how media art archives and collections can be connected without reducing their complexity. Lozana Rossenova proposed modular approaches to interoperability and data sovereignty, while Tjarda de Haan explored layered data models capable of capturing multiple versions of artworks. Florian van Zandwijk presented Living Media Art as a participatory platform that activates archival material through user interaction. Contributions from Andrew Gryf Paterson and Antti Ahonen further emphasised the collective and often informal nature of archiving. Preservation here appeared as an ongoing negotiation between structure and complexity, openness and control.

Questions of access were extended in the presentation by Nestor Siré, who examined Cuba’s El Paquete Semanal as a decentralised offline network for distributing media. His work demonstrated how communities build resilient infrastructures in response to limited connectivity, challenging assumptions about digital access and visibility.

The panel on AI in documentation introduced a more explicit engagement with emerging technologies. Steve Benford addressed the opportunities and risks of AI-driven research, particularly in relation to corporate infrastructures, while Gabriella Giannachi proposed human-in-the-loop systems to make bias visible within an “AI ecosystem of care.” Constant Dullaart approached bias as a material, demonstrating how it can be actively shaped within artistic and technical workflows while advocating for self-built, transparent infrastructures. Across the discussion, AI was framed as something that reshapes documentation itself, raising questions around authorship, control, ethics, and responsibility.

The final panel, with Jan Robert Leegte, Esther Polak, Bente van Bourgondiën, and Nick Tandavanitj, explored how digital technologies mediate spatial experience. Through practices engaging movement, mapping, and participation, the panel highlighted how space is continuously produced through interaction, reintroducing attention, embodiment, and situated knowledge within increasingly abstracted systems.

Across both days, the symposium outlined a field in transition. Preservation is no longer defined solely by storage or technical stability, but by the capacity to sustain relationships, contexts, and access over time. This includes developing infrastructures that are adaptable, addressing the ethical and political dimensions of technology, and supporting collaboration across disciplines. Rapidly changing new technologies present the sector with new questions at all levels: What do these technological developments mean for artworks, artists, preservation.  This concerns not only how it is created but also who determines what is visible and where economic value is generated. Next to creation and distribution of content the underlying technology, data, and AI models become more significant, raising the question of who determines what we see, trust, and believe.

Within this evolving landscape, LI-MA’s position remains both practical and strategic: as a mediator between artists, institutions, and technologies, and as a contributor to the shared frameworks that enable the long-term care of digital and media art. Drawing on decades of experience in preserving media art, actively supporting artists, institutions, and infrastructures today, and contributing to the development of frameworks that will shape how digital and media art can be sustained, accessed, and understood over time, the symposium serves as a critical platform for knowledge exchange, experimentation, and reflection. It provides a space where practitioners, researchers, and institutions come together to confront the challenges of preservation and explore emerging practices. By convening these conversations, LI-MA highlights the urgency of care and collaboration in digital art, demonstrating how shared discourse can translate into actionable strategies and sustainable networks across the media art ecosystem.

Photos: Transformation Digital Art 2026. Credit: Alex Heuvink