For a decade, TDA has been a key international gathering for anyone invested in the long-term preservation, reactivation, and accessibility of digital art. The 2026 edition takes “Networks: Structures of Collaboration, Care, and Trust” as its theme, exploring how digital artworks are (re)shaped by the systems they inhabit.

As decentralised infrastructures, distributed archives, and intelligent technologies become more embedded in cultural practice, fundamental questions arise: Who takes responsibility for digital artworks? How do we foster trust across systems and communities? And what does sustainable preservation look like in a landscape defined by volatility, fragmentation, and rapid technological change? 

From online platforms to social infrastructures and distributed archives, the symposium also 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.

Across two days of talks, conversations, case studies, and workshops, contributors from around the world will share insights, test ideas, and imagine new models for sustaining digital artworks in an age shaped by platforms, infrastructures, and rapidly evolving tools.

First programme announcement

Thursday, 26 March

Day 1 examines how trust-based and decentralised systems are redefining responsibility for digital art. Across three panels and a keynote, speakers explore how artists, museums, developers, and communities navigate interconnected infrastructures – from online platforms to social and blockchain-based systems – and the opportunities and tensions they generate.

Day 1 is co-curated and moderated by Annet Dekker. Artist, researcher, and developer Sarah Friend will deliver a keynote on “the good death” of digital objects and the promises and pitfalls of decentralisation.

Presentations and discussions on Day 1 will include Brian Castriota and Hélia Marçal (University College London) on the ethics of retreat-ability: how withdrawal, decay, and intentional disappearance can become part of a work’s life cycle. 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.

Friday, 27 March

Day 2 turns to issues of trust and the ethics and impacts of digital tools – especially AI – and how technologies enable collaboration while introducing new forms of risk, bias, and exclusion.

Curator and writer Amira Gad (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) will give a keynote on the societal and institutional implications of algorithmic systems, which will be followed by panel conversations about connecting data, ethical uses of AI. 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. 

Besides panels and presentations, workshops and hands-on sessions will take place, including sessions specifically for students. More programme announcements will follow.

Tickets & Registration

Early bird pass-partout tickets, granting access to both symposium days, are available now for one month only. Day tickets, student tickets, and workshop registrations will follow.

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