Curating digital and media art as an ecology: infrastructure, organisational protocols, and value governance, 2005–2025

Research on the curation of digital and media art is scattered across exhibition studies, museum practice, digital heritage, and conservation, and its curatorial questions are seldom treated together. This article reviews that literature to establish what is known about how such art is curated, maintained, and governed. Following PRISMA-ScR guidance, searches of the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus in February 2026, with citation tracking, were supplemented in October 2026; 64 English-language sources published between 2005 and 2025 were charted and thematically coded. Three domains organise the evidence: infrastructure, organisational protocols, and value governance. Across them, curating appears as sustained work on the conditions that keep unstable works operable and intelligible, carried out through negotiation among curators, conservators, technicians, and artists. Emphasis within the corpus shifts across four publication periods: infrastructure dominates the earliest period, organisational protocols form the largest domain in 2011–2015, and value governance expands last, with cultural identity and technological responsibility emerging mainly after 2020. The article interprets these relations through the idea of curatorial ecology and identifies gaps in post-2020 exhibition evidence, in comparative and longitudinal research, in studies of institutions beyond the major collecting museums, and in non-English and Global South contexts.