EMBARK: The Quiet Infrastructure Saving On-Chain Art for the Next Century

While we argue about whether art belongs on-chain, European museums have quietly organized 150+ specialists across 30 countries to solve a different question: what happens to all of it in 50 years.

EMBARK — European Media and Born-digital Art Conservation and Knowledge Network

EMBARK launched this year as the first pan-European initiative dedicated to preserving media art and born-digital works. EU-funded through COST Action CA24129, running through October 2029.

The scope covers everything museums have been collecting since the 1960s: film, video, sound, software, networked environments, and — crucially — blockchain-based art.

The Problem

European museums have been actively collecting media art for decades. What they have not done is build the infrastructure to keep it alive. The expertise exists but is scattered across disconnected institutions and small university departments. Knowledge stays siloed. Tools are inaccessible. There is no shared understanding across countries of what “preserving” even means for a work that lives on a server, a smart contract, or a chain that might not exist in thirty years.

Five Working Groups

EMBARK organized this into five working groups:

  1. Networks of Expertise and Infrastructure — Dr Conor McGarrigle
  2. Software-based Art and Ownership — Claudia Roeck & Boban Joksimoski (directly addresses NFTs and blockchain art)
  3. How can AI support conservation of digital media art? — Sophie Bunz & Jina Chang
  4. Shared Systems of Documentation and Knowledge Management — Sabina Claudia Suru
  5. Sustainability and the Preservation of Media Artworks — William Kilbride

Key Connections to Crypto Art

Working Group 2 focuses on works whose ownership, provenance, or existence is mediated by software. That includes NFTs, on-chain generative art, and anything where the certificate of authenticity is a token rather than a piece of paper.

Working Group 3 asks: how can AI support the conservation of digital media art? Not about AI making art — about AI keeping art alive: automating format migration, detecting bit rot, reconstructing degraded files.

The advisory board includes Sabine Himmelsbach, director of HEK Basel, running a 2026 partnership with the Tezos Foundation around blockchain art exhibitions and preservation. HEK is hosting a training school on NFT preservation at ZKM Karlsruhe — the same center that lost two of four CryptoPunks in 2021 due to technical complexity.

US Parallel: Canyon

Canyon, a 40,000-square-foot institution, opens autumn 2026 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side devoted to time-based and digital art. Built with its own conservation center — a standalone nonprofit lab for media art preservation. A 2025 field study found overwhelming demand across US museums for specialist conservation help.

The Real Shift

The point is not that institutions are finally noticing crypto art. Many already have — Centre Pompidou, MoMA, LACMA, Buffalo AKG, the Whitney have been acquiring blockchain-based works for years.

The point is that preservation is now an organized discipline with its own funding, its own research agenda, and its own political backing across an entire continent. The question has shifted from “should museums collect on-chain art” to “how do museums keep on-chain art functional for the people who will inherit it.”

For the artists minting generative work on Tezos right now, for the coders deploying smart contracts on Art Blocks, for everyone building art that exists primarily as software — this infrastructure is the difference between the work being a cultural artifact and the work being a dead link. The market does not price this in. The collectors buying today do not check whether the work has a conservation plan. But the museums organizing right now are the ones who will determine which of these works are still viewable in 2070.

Sources

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