LI-MA – Living Media Art presents the 10th edition of Transformation Digital Art (TDA), its annual international symposium dedicated to the sustainable care and preservation of digital art. Taking place in Amsterdam, this two-day event brings together artists, researchers, museum and heritage professionals, and students to share knowledge, practices, and critical perspectives on how digital artworks can remain accessible over time.

For more than a decade, TDA has served as a platform for exchange at the intersection of artistic practice, technological change, and preservation work. The 2026 edition is organised around the theme “Networks: Structures of Collaboration, Care, and Trust”, foregrounding the infrastructures, dependencies, and collective responsibilities that shape digital artworks throughout their lifecycles.

DAY 2 — Friday 27 March

09:30 Walk-in and coffee

10:00 – 10:15 10 years of Transformation Digital Art – Gaby Wijers (director and founder, LI-MA)

Framing: Care, Approaches and Tools

Day 2 reflects on how care, collaboration, and trust are shaped by digital technologies and the tools we use to create, document, and preserve digital art. While technology is often framed as emancipatory and democratising, it also introduces ethical tensions, systemic biases, and new forms of exclusion. Technologies such as artificial intelligence are transforming the conditions of artistic production, as well as its documentation and preservation, and raise urgent questions around control, benefit, responsibility, and reliability. Across keynotes and panels, Day 2 examines how trust is built – or undermined – through technological systems and infrastructures.

10:15 – 11:00 Keynote: Amira Gad (Curator, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen / Sonsbeek 2026) –  Digital Art as Intangible Heritage: A Shifting Cultural Landscape

Amira Gad explores how digital art is reshaping the role of museums and cultural institutions. Addressing the tension between digital art as spectacle and as a tool for critical reflection, she considers both its potential to widen cultural access and the risks of digital inequality and colonial power structures. Gad argues for approaches to presenting digital art that amplify diverse voices, question underlying technologies, and foreground dialogue, care, and shared cultural meaning.

11:00 – 12:30 Panel: Connecting Archives, Collections and Data

This panel explores emerging infrastructures that connect archives, collections, and data to support long-term access, reuse, and knowledge-sharing around digital art.

• Lozana Rossenova (Senior Researcher, TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology) – ECHOLOT (online)
• Tjarda de Haan (Project Lead, Connecting Media Art; LI-MA / Bits and Bytes United) – Connecting Media Art
• Florian van Zandwijk (Artist and Designer) – Living Media Art Platform
• Andrew Gryf Paterson (Artist-organiser and Researcher, Pixelache / Aalto University ART) & Antti Ahonen (Artist, Photographer and Organiser, Pixelache) – Archiving 20 Years of Festivals and Cultural Production

Moderated by Elsbeth Kwant (Strategic Advisor, KB – National Library of the Netherlands)

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch

13:30 – 14:00 Nestor Siré (Artist, Rijksakademie Resident 2024–2026) – Offline Networks: Creativity Beyond the Internet

Drawing on El Paquete Semanal, Siré examines informal infrastructures of data circulation in contexts where internet access is limited or absent, reflecting on how creativity, authorship, and distribution emerge beyond online networks.

14:00 – 16:00 Panel: Connecting AI in Documenting and Representing Digital Art

This panel examines ethical, conceptual, and practical frameworks for using AI in the documentation and representation of digital art.

• Steve Benford (Professor of Computer Science, University of Nottingham) – From Performance Documentation to AI Dataset
• John Moore (Head of Emerging Technologies Research, The National Archives, UK) & Adam Lockhart (lecturer, University of Dundee) – REWIND
• Sophie Bunz (Conservator for Modern Materials and Media Art, RED Düsseldorf; EMBARK AI Working Group Lead) – Reflections on the first EMBARK AI workshop
• Gabriella Giannachi (Professor of Performance and New Media, University of Exeter) – Addressing Bias in Documentation
• Constant Dullaart (artist; director, Distant.Gallery; Founding Professor, Networked Materialities, AdBK Nürnberg) – Reflections on the CONTENTMACHINES workshop

Moderated by Daniëlle Arets (designer and researcher) 

16:00 – 16:15 Break

16:15 – 17:30 Panel: Connecting Data, Art and Location

This panel addresses future challenges in preserving digital artworks involving locative media, autonomous systems, AI-generated content, and audience participation.

• Jan Robert Leegte (artist) – The Wanderer (2025)
• Esther Polak (artist) – Reactivating Amsterdam Realtime (2002–2026)
• Nick Tandavanitj (artist & researcher, Blast Theory / University of Nottingham) – Rider Spoke: Here (2007–2026)
• Moderated by Marijn Bril (curator)

17:30 Closing remarks and drinks

Parallel Programme

10:00 – 13:15 ROTBOTS/CONTENTMACHINES Workshop – Constant Dullaart & Fabian Hampel (Artist, AdBK Nürnberg)

Participants collaboratively build a shared “content-generating machine”, gaining hands-on insight into algorithmic content production, platform logics, bias, and automation beyond surface-level tool use.

Header & thumbnail: Transformation Digital Art 2025. Photo by Alex Heuvink.