archAIve | 2025–2028
Re-thinking media art archives through AI, artistic research, and public engagement
archAIve – Access and Re-creation of Cultural Heritage archives challenging Artificial Intelligence for Valued Engagement – is a Creative Europe Cooperation Project exploring how generative AI is transforming the ways cultural heritage is preserved, accessed, interpreted, and recreated. Focusing on media art archives from the 1960s to the present, the project repositions archives not only as repositories of the past, but as active and critical tools for understanding the cultural impact of AI.
Public Art Lab is beneficiary of a strong European consortium of organisations working across media art, digital culture, archives, curatorship, artistic research, and technological innovation under the project lead of
MEET Digital Culture Center (Milan / Italy)
an Italian and European leading centre for digital culture and immersive media
New Art Foundation (Reus, Catalania / Spain)
A former industrial heritage site in Catalonia transformed into an international hub for digital art, ecological research, artist residencies, and the conservation and archiving of media art.
Museu Zer0 (Santa Catarina / Portugal)
a Portugal based cultural institution connecting immersive digital art, artist residencies, digital memory, and emerging technologies.
Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision (Hilversum / Netherlands),
One of Europe’s leading audiovisual archives, preserving and activating millions of hours of Dutch media heritage through digital innovation, immersive storytelling, and public access.
Programme and Activities
Through 18 artist residencies, webinars and workshops, exhibitions and public media camapaignss, and open-access resources, archAIve supports emerging artists and cultural operators in developing future-oriented skills and ethical approaches to AI technologies.
The project explores how generative AI can contribute to the preservation, reinterpretation, and activation of media art archives while also questioning the cultural logics, biases, and ethics embedded within these systems. Rather than treating archives as static repositories, archAIve activates them as living infrastructures for experimentation, participation, and collective reflection on Europe’s cultural futures.
The project is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
