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LI-MA – Living Media Art proudly presents the 10th edition of Transformation Digital Art (TDA), the annual international symposium dedicated to the preservation of digital art. This two-day event, hosted at LI-MA in Amsterdam, brings together artists, scholars, institutions, and students to exchange knowledge and explore new approaches to caring for digital art, ensuring its continued accessibility and relevance in an ever-evolving digital landscape. The first speakers for TDA 2026 are confirmed. Early bird tickets are now available in limited numbers. 

Networks: Structures of collaboration, care, and trust
Amid intensifying conversations around decentralisation, networks of care, and the commons, Transformation Digital Art 2026 reconsiders entrenched hierarchies of preservation. Emerging approaches – whether social, organisational, or blockchain-based – promise new ways of safeguarding digital art while raising unresolved questions about ownership, access, and long-term sustainability.

From online platforms to social infrastructures and distributed archives, the symposium examines how trust-based and decentralised systems might cultivate shared responsibility for digital artworks. Technology, and AI in particular, offers new possibilities but also reshapes authorship, documentation, and preservation in ways that introduce risks, raising questions of control, benefit, exclusion, and the reliability of the tools and datasets shaping creative and archival work.

  • Day 1 (26 March) focuses on how trust dynamics are reshaping the preservation of digital art, redefining the roles of artists, institutions, and communities in sustaining digital culture.
  • Day 2 (27 March) examines care and tools, questioning how digital infrastructures and technologies can be used collaboratively, critically and responsibly.
A digital device with a row of red and black buttons and a screen with technical symbols and measurements.
Jonas Lund, Network Maintenance, 2025. PLA, custom hardware, software, 25x25x5cm. Photo courtesy of LI-MA.

Programme highlights
The first programme announcement reveals an inspiring lineup of speakers and contributors at the forefront of digital art and its preservation. Further announcements and programme details will be shared in the coming months.

Keynote lectures will be delivered by artist, researcher, and software developer Sarah Friend, curator and writer Amira Gad (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen). Presentations and discussions will include Brian Castriota and Hélia Marçal (University College London) on the ethics of retreat-ability. Inge Hinterwaldner (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) and Annet Dekker (University of Amsterdam) will present and discuss codes of (in)formal preservation. Artist Jonas Lund will present Network Maintenance (2025), a living network of connected interfaces where ownership becomes care. Artists Esther Polak, Nick Tandavanitj, and Jan Robert Leegte will discuss the unique preservation challenges of locative media art, addressing questions of obsolescence, context, and reactivation. 

Students and participants will also be invited to join workshops on the future of digital artworks and the use of AI in preservation and creative practice.

Transformation Digital Art 2026 is curated by Gaby Wijers (LI-MA), in collaboration with Annet Dekker as co-curator and co-moderator.

Registration is now open. For more information and tickets, visit li-ma.nl.

Partners
This event is made possible with the support of Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst (AFK). 

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