Born-digital heritage is commonly associated with the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. Earlier digital cultures—shaped by floppy disks, home computers, and offline exchange—remain comparatively underexplored, particularly in East-Central Europe. This paper focuses on Polish floppy disk magazines (“diskmags”) from the 1980s and 1990s as a case study for rethinking early born-digital grassroots media.

Diskmags were multimedia, executable periodicals distributed on 5.25-inch floppy disks. Combining text, graphics, music, and code, they were closely tied to demoscene communities and to specific hardware platforms such as the Commodore C64 and Atari systems. Their material and technical dependencies pose significant challenges for preservation and analysis: meaningful access requires emulation environments, structured metadata, and interdisciplinary approaches integrating media archaeology, textual scholarship, and software preservation.

We present a newly curated subset of East-Central European diskmags within the international Diskmags Catalog. The dataset was created through semi-automated filtering, qualitative verification, emulation-based inspection, and linguistic classification. It is accessible via a web interface and as downloadable CSV files, enabling both exploratory browsing and computational analysis.

Methodologically, the project aims to combine metadata-driven quantitative analyses (publication timelines, network analysis of production groups) with qualitative close reading of emulated issues. We also assess the potential and limitations of large language models for language detection and thematic clustering in non-standard, multimedia-rich corpora.

By foregrounding Polish and East-Central European diskmags, the project contributes to diversifying digital heritage narratives and asks whether current digital humanities infrastructures are adequately prepared to engage with materially complex, pre-web digital culture.

Currently we are witnessing dynamic growth of digital archives, which has transformed access to historical sources and created unprecedented opportunities for engaging with cultural heritage. Artists of Polish off-theatre frequently incorporate digital reproductions of documents, photographs, and oral history recordings into their performances.

For Weronika Fibich, archival material is a key artistic medium. In her performance ‘Drawing from Memory’ (2010/2012), photographs found in a digital archive played a crucial role. In ‘Once Upon a Time in Glutendorf’ (Ewa Kaczmarek, Daniel Stachuła, 2025), the creative process was driven by the desire to stage and expand the community-based ‘Główna District Archive’. Jacek Owczarek and Kacper Klimczak, while working on ‘Brakarki’ (2024), discovered the social digital archive ‘Miastograf’. They not only used materials collected there, but also based the entire narrative of the performance on them.

All of these performances depict places and communities that no longer exist. Archival resources function both as artistic material and as stage representations of historical existence. Thus, representation becomes a key concept for both digital archives and theatre. Analog archival materials already represent history; in the case of digitized materials, we can speak of double representation. Traditional theatre represents the past through the illusionistic “playing of the past” (Lehmann’s principle of representation) while post-dramatic theatre reveals its identity (principle of presence).

In this presentation, I analyze selected practices of Polish off-theatre in relation to representation and the transformations brought about by the digitization of heritage. Drawing on qualitative research, I argue that digital archives, through their accessibility and structure, not only provide source material but also actively shape the aesthetics of contemporary off-theatre.

Across Europe and globally, cultural institutions are rapidly integrating artificial intelligence, immersive media, and networked infrastructures into heritage and curatorial practice. These systems are typically evaluated through a functional paradigm that prioritises responsiveness, efficiency, and seamless optimisation. This paper argues that such criteria are insufficient. Digital mediation is not just reactive delivery but is a performative configuration of computational systems stage encounters through which cultural knowledge is structured, authorised, and experienced.

The paper introduces the Scene–Actor–Script–Audience (SASA) model as a transferable methodological framework for analysing and designing technologically mediated environments. Rather than focusing solely on data accuracy or system responsiveness, the model foregrounds how spatial settings, algorithmic logics, institutional authority, and embodied participation interact to produce meaning. Central to this approach is a distinction between reactivity and performativity: systems may function reliably without continuously responding on demand, instead shaping temporal rhythm, attention, and interpretive possibility.

The framework is applied to two completed case studies in Chinese cultural contexts: a projection intervention within a UNESCO World Heritage garden in Suzhou and an augmented reality installation in a transcultural architectural environment. These projects are positioned not as peripheral examples but as methodological sites of learning. By working within non-Western spatial philosophies that privilege relational pacing and environmental primacy, the cases challenge the global homogenisation of audience-facing technologies in cultural institutions.

As generative AI increasingly contributes institutional voice across multilingual and transnational infrastructures, questions of authority intensify. Linking digital environments across Europe requires more than technical interoperability; it demands attention to how mediation performs across borders. By modelling digital systems as staged actors rather than neutral tools, this paper offers digital humanities a framework for designing and governing AI-mediated cultural infrastructures in ways that remain situated, reflexive, and accountable.