“I was drawn to data sovereignty as a general concept because as audiences and creators, our digital interactions increasingly fragment into pieces that get reconstituted across various works and mediums,” shared State of the Arts Collective Member and attendee, Bria Cole, who is currently building a conversational AI character exploring human and machine creativity.
Participants gained practical knowledge about emerging storage networks and governance frameworks that can help cultural institutions build agency over their digital asset collections.
“The current AI development paradigm treats cultural data as a raw material to be extracted rather than a shared heritage to be collectively governed,” says 221A Head of Digital Strategy, Jesse McKee. “Without trusted intermediaries, we risk further concentrating power in the hands of a few AI companies while cultural producers are excluded from the value generated by their creations.”
Participants were also presented research findings conducted last summer which provided crucial context on digital storage practices in galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and special collections. Led by Reiko Pleau to develop a prototype for The Node Library, the research revealed 55% of cultural organizations use private cloud storage providers as their primary method of storage including Google, Microsoft and Dropbox, while 27% rely on local hard drives. Despite growing interest in sovereign solutions in community owned data, the research highlighted a gap in adoption, accounting for only 3.2% of cultural organizations using any form of decentralized technology for storage.
“The adoption gap is actually a knowledge gap,” says Jesse. “What we’re seeing with this workshop is that collecting organizations have limited pathways to exercise control over their digital assets.”
Photos by Kayla Isomura.
221A is co-creating the technical and governance infrastructure for a FAIR data ecosystems to ensure that cultural data is:
- Findable through proper attribution
- Accessible through democratic governance
- Interoperable through open protocols
- Reusable through ethical licensing frameworks.
“The workshop reinforced the need for sustainable, artist-centered strategies to safeguard our audiovisual heritage,” says Executive Director of Moving Images Distribution Society, Karen Wong, who attended both sessions. “Leveraging digital tools for distribution and ensuring fair licensing payments to media artists is vital in an era of shifting digital infrastructures.”
Future Funding Opportunity: Cultural Memory Lab
All workshop participants are eligible to apply for the upcoming Cultural Memory Lab, a microgranting program from Tech Soup and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web connecting organizations across the US, Canada and Thailand. This program will provide selected projects with funding up to $5,000 USD, along with technical support and access to a Decentralized Web for Creators course.
The Cultural Memory Lab will run from March to June 2025, supporting 3-5 projects that leverage decentralized technologies for cultural preservation. Teams will be selected based on their focus on community archives and promising plans for applying decentralized technologies to cultural memory work.