With Isabella Salas and Patti Schmidt

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The digital and media arts ecosystem in Québec is dense, yet unevenly connected. Artists, institutions, and research groups often operate in close proximity without necessarily sharing tools, vocabularies, or infrastructures. As a result, practices circulate unevenly, and many works remain difficult to locate, reference, or build upon.

This workshop takes that condition as a starting point.

Led by Isabella Salas from the International Digital Arts Alliance and Patti Schmidt, the session brings together artists, cultural workers, and researchers to work through these questions collectively. Participants will map their own practices alongside others, tracing how work is produced, documented, and made visible.

Rather than defining the field from above, the workshop assembles it from within.

This second iteration of the smART workshop series functions as a working session. Through discussion and practical exercises, participants will identify gaps in documentation, compare methods, and begin to outline shared vocabularies and structures that support the long term circulation of digital artworks.

The objective is to contribute to the development of a collective platform, one that reflects real practices, supports discoverability, and enables connections across disciplines and institutions.

This activity is presented as part of the Interdisciplinary Encounters 2026.

About smART

smART, the collective memory of digital arts, is an initiative developed within the International Digital Arts Alliance, in dialogue with artists, researchers, and cultural institutions.

Through workshops, shared tools, and collaborative formats, smART addresses a recurring gap. While digital artworks are widely produced and experienced, they remain difficult to document, archive, and rediscover over time.

The initiative creates conditions for practitioners to work together on these challenges, aligning vocabularies, developing documentation methods, and testing tools for metadata creation, preservation, and dissemination.

In this context, translation across cultural, institutional, and technological frameworks is understood as an active process. It enables practices to circulate while maintaining their specificity.

By supporting co-authorship, shared governance, and equitable access to visibility, smART contributes to a more connected and resilient digital arts ecosystem in Québec, grounded in reciprocity and care.

Cover image : courtesy of smART

Published on May 5, 2026

Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)