Updated 19 September 2026
From the 1970s onwards, Amsterdam was one of the places in Europe where artists experimented with video, performance, electronic music and later the internet. This domain once carried work by a publisher of art and new media. The present site is a different project, but for that reason the subject has a section of its own here.
De Appel and the 1970s
De Appel was founded in 1975 by Wies Smals as a platform for research into and presentation of visual art. In the early years the emphasis was on performance, video and installation, disciplines that still found little room in established museums. De Appel grew into an institution for contemporary art with exhibitions and a programme for curators.
LI-MA: the archive of Dutch media art
The collections now managed by LI-MA, short for Living Media Art, date from the same period. LI-MA continues the work of Montevideo, which collected, distributed and showed video and media art in Amsterdam. The organisation manages and distributes a collection of work by more than five hundred artists, from pioneers such as Nan Hoover to a new generation. LI-MA also researches the preservation of media art, a discipline in itself: playback equipment disappears, software ages and file formats fall out of use. In 2026 Nxt Museum showed an exhibition on the early years of Montevideo, put together with LI-MA.
Sonic Acts and Paradiso
Sonic Acts was founded in 1994 by Paradiso and the ArtScience Interfaculty of the Royal Academy of Art and the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. The festival began as a platform for new developments in electronic music and interdisciplinary art and was held at Paradiso in its first years. Since 2001 each edition has had its own theme. Today Sonic Acts also works beyond the festival, with research, commissions for artists and co-productions with partners in the Netherlands and abroad.
Waag Futurelab
The Waag on Nieuwmarkt, the old fifteenth-century city gate, houses Waag Futurelab. The organisation focuses on technology and society and works with artists, designers and researchers. The fab lab in the building makes digital fabrication accessible; through the Fab Academy, participants learn to work with that equipment over twenty weeks. The building itself is described in the article on city centre museums.
Nxt Museum in Noord
Nxt Museum opened in August 2020 in Amsterdam-Noord and concentrates on large-scale immersive installations using light, sound, sensors and software. It is regarded as the first museum in the Netherlands devoted exclusively to this kind of work. The exhibitions are made to be walked through and so attract a different audience from the classic art museums. More on Noord is in the neighbourhood portrait of Amsterdam-Noord.
Design
For design, the Stedelijk Museum is the most important place in the city, with a collection covering posters, furniture, jewellery and industrial design. Architecture and applied art of the early twentieth century are best seen in the streets themselves: the Amsterdam School shaped entire neighbourhoods. That is the subject of the article on the Amsterdam School.
Where to see the work
Media art is less tied to one place than painting. Part of the work appears in exhibitions at Eye, the Stedelijk and Nxt Museum, part at festivals, and part can be rented through LI-MA's distribution for screenings elsewhere. Following the field mainly means keeping an eye on the programmes of those institutions and checking the annual calendar for the autumn festivals, when the offer is largest.
Source: LI-MA