Since the 1960s, artists across Europe have worked with film, video, sound, software, and networked systems to expand the boundaries of artistic practice. Media art has always been inherently international – circulating across borders, disciplines, and technological platforms. Today, this shared heritage is under increasing pressure. Obsolete technologies, fragmented expertise, and uneven resources place many collections at risk, particularly those held by smaller institutions. Addressing these challenges requires approaches that move beyond individual organisations. Preservation, in this context, is a collective, transnational responsibility. 

EMBARK: A Pan-European Response

As legacy technologies become obsolete, expertise is scattered, and vital artworks face loss, media art collections are at risk. EMBARK (European Media and Born-Digital Art Conservation and Knowledge Network) is the first pan-European initiative dedicated to addressing these challenges at scale. Bringing together academic researchers, heritage professionals, artists, and technologists, EMBARK builds a cohesive, interdisciplinary network focused on safeguarding media art heritage.

The network prioritises knowledge exchange and capacity building, developing shared approaches to preservation, documentation, and interpretation. Working groups are started on infrastructure, AI, legal and ethical questions around software-based art, documentation and more. Sustainability – both environmental and institutional – forms a key part of EMBARK’s framework.

LI-MA – Living Media Art is pleased to be part of the core group of EMBARK. After first coming together in 2023 ahead of our annual symposium, the network will reconvene in March 2026, when LI-MA welcomes EMBARK partners to Amsterdam for their general meeting. During Transformation Digital Art 2026, Patricia Falcão (Tate) will present the project and its ongoing work.

Expanding the Network

LI-MA’s mission is to approach preservation not only in terms of storage or longevity, but as an ongoing practice of care, acknowledging bodies, ethics, archives, and communities as inseparable from the technologies that shape them. Alongside EMBARK, a constellation of international-facing projects broadens the scope of LI-MA’s engagement with emerging technologies. 

Among these initiatives is Somabotics: Creatively Embodying AI, a UKRI-funded fellowship led by Steve Benford, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham and UKRI Turing AI Fellow. Launched last year, Somabotics brings together artists and researchers to explore artistic applications of artificial intelligence through embodied, interdisciplinary practice. At its core lies a deceptively simple yet far-reaching  question: how do humans make meaning through touch, movement, and encounter – and what shifts when these experiences are mediated by machines?

Projects such as Embrace Angels by Lancel/Maat and Cat Royale by Blast Theory pursue this question through practice, investigating embodied AI not as a tool for optimisation or prediction, but as a participant in human gestures of care.

BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) operates at a different but complementary scale. Working across arts, humanities, computer science, law, and social sciences, BRAID embeds critical and creative thinking directly into the responsible AI ecosystem. BRAID supports networks, funding calls, and public programmes that ensure ethical reflection is not an afterthought but a structural component of AI development.

One of its AHRC-funded projects ArcaiArt (Responsible use of AI in the creation, archiving, reactivation and conservation of artworks and their archives) is led by Dr Lydia Farina, with co-investigators from several UK universities. The project generates new knowledge on responsible innovation and creativity in the use of AI to create, document, reactivate, and conserve media artworks and their archives. It investigates how AI might address challenges long considered insurmountable for museums and archives tasked with preserving complex, mutable, and hybrid artworks over time.

LI-MA is organising and taking part in workshops that examine the use of AI through a comparative study of two media art collections: REWIND Artists’ Video at the University of Dundee and LI-MA in Amsterdam. The research focuses on how AI engages with diverse scans and documentation, how similar information appears across different collections, whether AI can generate meaningful narrative pathways from archival materials, and how it interprets data – including the extent to which its responses are shaped or personalised.

LI-MA as a Connecting Force

Within this evolving ecosystem, LI-MA plays a connective role, linking collections, research, and practice across borders. Drawing on long-standing experience in media art distribution, documentation, and conservation, LI-MA contributes both practical expertise and methodological insight to international collaborations.

Rather than positioning preservation as a closed or purely technical process, LI-MA’s work emphasises openness, shared standards, and dialogue, approaches that enable knowledge to circulate between institutions and national contexts. 

Transformation Digital Art 2026: A Meeting Point

These international collaborations will converge during Transformation Digital Art 2026, which will bring together partners, researchers, artists, and heritage professionals. The symposium is conceived as a space for exchange rather than conclusion: a place to test ideas, share tools, and reflect collectively on the future of digital art preservation.

Themes such as trust-based infrastructures, decentralised systems, AI, and sustainable preservation practices will be approached as interrelated concerns shaping the conditions under which digital artworks continue to exist.

Header: Steve Benford, Gabriella Giannachi, Richard Ramchurn, Lancel/Maat at Transformation Digital Art 2025. Photo by Alex Heuvink.