Cultural heritage is often encountered in dispersed or incomplete forms, yet these conditions can be turned into opportunities for engagement and reinterpretation. Rather than striving for unattainable unity, this paper explores how digital infrastructures and collaborative practices can reconnect heritage across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, fostering accessibility, participation, and shared meaning-making.

Through case studies spanning tangible heritage, such as archaeological and archival collections, and intangible heritage, including filmic and performative materials, the paper examines strategies of digital recomposition that illuminate traces of coherence and render intelligible histories of transformation. In different disciplinary contexts, this reflection translates into shared practices: digital exhibitions that reunite collections across institutions, collaborative archives and databases that combine dispersed data, and artificial intelligence tools that mediate and enhance access to diverse materials. These examples demonstrate how digital infrastructures can serve as spaces where heritage is not only preserved but actively reinterpreted, producing new narratives that acknowledge layered histories while opening them to broader publics.

Our discourse will discuss: how Italian silent cinema reinterprets archaeological imagery and contributes to cultural memory; data recovery and reinterpretation of legacy excavations; the use of archival sources for the enhancement of intangible heritage; and the development of Artificial Intelligence tools for restoring portraits, frescoes, and archaeological sites.

Digital restoration and AI technologies offer new ways of engaging with heritage, not by reconstructing an idealised integrity, but by generating accessibility, dialogue, and value. They enable new forms of hybridity, where tangible and intangible heritage intersect, and where infrastructures of engagement become spaces of co-creation. In this perspective, recomposition is not an end-state but an ongoing process that reflects evolving priorities and sensibilities. The discussion will consider the role of digital exhibitions and shared archives in reconnecting dispersed heritage, and the potential of AI to mediate access and enhance intelligibility. Particular attention will be given to the ethical and participatory dimensions of these practices, emphasising transparency, inclusivity, and sustainability.

The paper will also highlight specific case studies in which digital infrastructures have enabled new forms of visibility and accessibility, allowing both scholars and broader audiences to engage with heritage in ways that cultivate a nuanced understanding of continuity and change. Examples include archaeological finds dispersed across multiple institutions, film archives scattered by political or economic upheavals, and intangible practices preserved only in partial documentation. In each case, digital infrastructures have provided pathways to coherence without imposing artificial unity, enabling heritage to be experienced as a dynamic field of negotiation and reinterpretation.

By situating dispersion within the evolving narrative of heritage, these practices resist the temptation to impose closure and instead foster accessibility, coherence, and shared creativity. The goal is not to achieve complete unity, which is often unattainable, but to generate new ways of seeing and engaging with heritage that situate incompleteness as a vital chapter in its history. In doing so, digital infrastructures become spaces of connectivity across disciplines, institutions, and publics, cultivating generosity, participation, and shared creativity in the digital arts and humanities.