This is not just a local problem. Digital art has always existed outside the twentieth century museum model, too messy to preserve and too uncertain to fund.³ Even the twenty first century archival turn, which sought to consolidate, revise and reinterpret historical collections and preservation practices, failed to grasp the fibre-optic straws of the digital. Institutions embraced archives as a curatorial trend yet clung to material artwork that could be boxed, stored and catalogued, avoiding the challenge of born-digital works.⁴ Net art, software-based projects and other unstable formats boomed, but few institutions have managed to keep them alive.

You would think that Artbank, a government-founded initiative established to acquire and promote art by leasing acquisitions to public and private clients, would be a leader in digital art preservation. Yet, an April 2023 audit by the Australian National Audit Office found Artbank’s approach to acquiring, managing and leasing artworks, including the 116 video artworks in its collection, was inadequate. The report cited an overall lack of strategy, as well as improper procurement and conservation practices.⁵ With no clear policies for digital artworks and a laissez-faire approach to deaccession, the integrity of the collection is already at risk. The absence of proper guidelines has also led to the duplication of fourteen digital artworks so they can be rented to multiple clients at once. This raises concerns not just about preservation, but also whether artists know their works are being circulated this way and if they’re being compensated fairly for a rental model that resembles TV syndication more than traditional art leasing. Even a contemporary curatorial project like Artbank, ostensibly built to balance commercial incentives with public good, still lacks a clear approach to caring for digital artists and their work.

The Archiving Australian Media Arts (AAMA) project is a rare and recent institutional attempt at digital preservation, one that underscores how neglected the field has been. Launched just before the COVID-19 pandemic, it ran for three years with backing from the Australian Research Council, uniting university researchers with gallery, library, archive and museum (GLAM) institutions. The project aimed to stabilise digital media artworks, enable emulated access and rethink how historical media art is exhibited. ⁶ It resulted in a conference, an exhibition, and the first steps toward a blueprint for digital preservation. Most notably, it trialled the use of Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI), a cloud-based emulation platform that allows users to run period-specific software environments essential for accessing certain digital artworks. Unlike so many digital art initiatives that fade into obsolescence, the work begun by AAMA and its EaaSI trial has since evolved into the Australian Emulation Network, an effort to establish a national framework for digital preservation. But, as institutions like Griffith University Art Museum (GUAM) demonstrate, sustaining these efforts requires more than just a framework—it demands funding, resources and long-term commitment, all of which remain in short supply.

GUAM holds the largest collection within the AAMA group and the second largest inside Queensland—18 CD-ROM works from 1994-97 by sixteen artists. An unusual feat considering Queensland’s comparatively smaller arts landscape to Sydney or Melbourne. This collection was driven by a mid-90s push for digital acquisitions, complementing the university’s new media education agenda and backed by a Collections Development Grant from the Australia Council.⁷ Patrick Lester, GUAM’s Curatorial and Collections Officer, spoke with me about the project, noting, ‘Without that government funding, our collection would look entirely different. At the time, it was the largest grant in Australia for acquiring digital and video art.’ Yet, this funding was an anomaly, not a precedent. Nearly twenty years later, institutions like GUAM are only now receiving the support needed to stabilise and preserve their collections.

But it isn’t just a lack of government funding that has stalled preservation efforts. GUAM was unable to participate in the EaaSI aspect of the project due to limited resources, and its future involvement in the AAMA project remains uncertain. As Lester explains, ‘We’d love to participate in the full rollout of the project, but it’s challenging due to our small size and our resourcing’. The reality is that many of these institutions operate on a rotating skeleton staff with priorities dictated more by administrative survival than by long-term preservation. In fact, just days after the GUAM team presented their findings at the Born Digital Cultural Heritage conference in November 2023, news broke that the museum was set to close to make way for the Film School.⁸ The announcement sparked outrage, leading to protests and last-minute negotiations.⁹ Thanks to a property developer and a cash injection from alumni and supporters, GUAM bought itself another year.¹⁰ While GUAM hung in uncertainty for fourteen months, it’s a relief to hear that in late February 2025, the university confirmed it will not be closing, though it faces budget and staff reductions.¹¹ 

Digital art preservation is like trying to archive a moving river—you have to keep tracking its flow, or it vanishes. Institutions break the flow through neglect, underfunding, and shifting priorities, reducing collections to mere line items. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, writes in Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, memory is only as strong as its links: ‘when we forget, what we have lost is not the information itself, but the link to it’.¹¹ Today, those links are disappearing faster than we can rebuild them. Since 2013, 38% of the web’s links have disappeared or broken.¹² My own digital artwork has vanished. In 2020, I contributed an experimental audio-essay to Running Dog, an online arts publication funded by the Australia Council for the Arts (now Creative Australia) and the Copyright Agency. Now, aside from a few screenshot webpages on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, its website is gone. This isn’t an isolated case.

Another lost Australian government-funded initiative, Prototype, was a digital and video art newsletter founded and curated by Lauren Carroll Harris that ran for three iterations. Launched in 2019, it expanded during COVID-19 lockdowns, using email to bypass traditional exhibition models. Across its iterations, it adapted to shifting digital landscapes, but reliance on third-party platforms proved unstable. When Vimeo shut down the account (allegedly over pornographic imagery in Peter Strickland’s films, though the entire account was deleted without explanation), Carroll Harris moved to YouTube, which left the website looking broken. The archive now exists on a hard drive in her home, a fate sealed by a missed email about renewing the domain host. Though RMIT’s Australian Film Institute Research Collection approached her about archiving aspects of the project—screenshots, emails, and process documentation, but not the challenge of archiving the website itself—nothing came of it.

Prototype was never about scale but small, intentional moments of digital distribution. Yet, the expectation that artists and independent arts workers must also shoulder the bureaucracy of long-term preservation is both a logistical challenge and philosophically at odds with the very ethos that drives artist-run projects in the first place. These initiatives defy institutional rigmarole but remain at the mercy of tech platforms and media monopolies, making the demand for self-managed archiving an impossible paradox. Now, Prototype lingers in hidden torrent archives and scattered hard drives, a familiar fate for digital art.

One would think that the Australian government, having funded projects like Artbank, GUAM’s digital art collection, Running Dog, and Prototype, would at least preserve them as proof of investment. But as Mayer-Schönberger argues, digital memory since Web 2.0 has been less about knowledge and more about leverage.¹³ Institutions resurface artworks when it serves their reputation, much like social media users dredging up old posts to sustain a public dogpile. It appears that the predatory logic of today’s attention (or memory, in this context) economy—deeply entrenched in platforms that organise and monetise information like Google, Amazon, Meta, and TikTok—has shaped cultural preservation itself. Digital artworks and archives are no longer valued for their historical or artistic significance alone but for their ability to generate engagement, justify funding cycles, or bolster institutional credibility.

Even the public is catching on to the cracks in the myth of digital permanence. TikTok user @remasel experienced this firsthand when she searched for a beloved but niche 90s children’s animation, assuming it would be on YouTube. After thirty minutes of dead ends, she found only a bootleg copy on a sketchy website. The realisation hit hard: ‘the internet is NOT forever ’.¹⁴ Her viral video, now at 2.5 million views, struck a nerve. ‘Suddenly I went from “hoarder” to “archivist.” Finally,’ commented @winzer, capturing a growing public awareness—if institutions won’t preserve digital culture, individuals might have to do it themselves.

This tendency to perform progress while sidestepping its material implications is everywhere. An art university without an art gallery is as senseless as software without hardware. Just like a digital art collection with no evolving archival strategy, both suggest an infrastructure that no longer serves its cultural purpose. The same goes for blockbuster art museums that digitise the experience of their non-digital collections—AR apps that animate paintings, clunky 3D walkthroughs, architectured selfie spots—while neglecting digital-born works. The 2024 Whitney Biennial’s AI theme is a case in point, framing artificial intelligence as a central premise while only a handful of artists actually used the technology. As new media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun observes in Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, every use of software as metaphor, here, as a hollow stand-in for progress, entails an act of faith. ¹⁵ And as people are beginning to realise, that faith, like so many institutional links to the digital, was built on empty promises.

But, like Mayer-Schönberger, I believe there is virtue in deletion. In our digital age, it has forced the return of third spaces online, the kind that tech and media monopolies spent decades dismantling. Platforms like Internet Archive, Aaaaarg, Do Not Research, This Light, r/lostmedia and torrent collectives (which I will not name for privacy) resist the corporatisation of memory. These decentralised networks challenge our culture’s fixation on digital permanence, a fixation that has turned memory into a reputational minefield–stifling action through fear-mongering and bureaucratic red tape, reducing cultural engagement to careful, commercialised self-curation.

For Carroll Harris, a future for digital art and archiving requires ‘rejecting the moral/ethical panic around piracy, recognising that torrenting isn’t inherently criminal, and valuing the archiving of digital and video art that institutions have failed to protect.’ I believe in this because, if the twenty first century’s archival turn taught us anything, it’s that archiving has never been a passive act. Governments and GLAM institutions may frame digital loss as inevitable, but digital art archiving has been happening elsewhere for years. In the hands of anonymous data thieves, torrent seeders and digital caretakers, a long-marginalised form of curatorship is gaining momentum. It is expanding beyond niche communities to those who refuse to let institutional neglect justify itself, where absence is mistaken for irrelevance and relevance is measured only in dopamine-addled immediacy. Instead, it insists on necessity, resistance, and the will to remember our digital art in care rather than commodification.