An international call to preserve the cultural heritage of our digital age

We, Ars Electronica, MIT Open Documentary Lab & Co-Creation Studio, and SAT, are among the first generation to have created a significant portion of our collective imagination in formats that disappear faster than human memory.

For over thirty years, artists, creators, researchers, and communities worldwide have been inventing new forms of expression based on digital technologies, creating interactive, immersive, generative, and connected works. These evolving works reflect our era, our dreams, our fears, and our relationship to the world.

Yet this heritage is now endangered.

Every day, works become unreadable, inaccessible. Software disappears. Platforms shut down and take our data with them. Operating systems become obsolete. Servers are unplugged. Files become corrupted, knowhow is lost.

Some works created merely twenty years ago are already more difficult to access than centuries-old manuscripts.

The preservation of our technological memory must now meet an additional imperative: ecological sobriety. At a time when the volume of data being created exceeds any capacity for preservation, appraisal is essential; not as resignation, but as discipline. At the same time, the climate crisis is weakening the physical and digital infrastructures that house our cultural memory, threatening this accumulated knowledge, these identities, and these creations.

The concentration of our digital memory under the control of a few private actors, without protocols guaranteeing data sovereignty, threatens to dispossess all our communities of their own memory. This dispossession risks excluding from world memory the cultural rights of all, and deepening existing inequalities between communities that have the means to preserve their memory and those who do not.

We are witnessing, in silence, the gradual erasure of an essential part of our cultural memory.
This disappearance is neither natural nor inevitable. It is the result of unregulated technological acceleration and a lack of sustained funding for public institutions. It stems from a lack of collective vision. We must work together to develop a more sustainable approach to these challenges.
We affirm today that digital works constitute a global cultural heritage. Anyone who wishes to preserve them must have the means to conserve them, document them, study them, restore them and pass them on to future generations, in respect of cultural diversity and the limits of our ecosystem.

Digital works hold the same standing as classical art, not a lesser one. This recognition can’t be assumed; it has to be won.

We call for immediate international mobilization and an initial gathering of signatories before 2028.