Date: 30 September 2026
Venue: Godsbanen, Room: Remisen – Karen Wegeners Gade 2 eller 8, Aarhus (DK)
9.00 – 9.30 • Coffee and Registration
Arrive, connect with fellow participants and start the day with informal networking.
9.30 – 10.00 • Welcome and Opening
Setting the scene for Time Machine Connect 2026: where the Time Machine community stands today, how the wider European digital heritage landscape is evolving, and why connecting heritage, technology and the creative industries matters now.
- Frédéric Kaplan – President, Time Machine Organisation
10.00-11.00 • Keynotes: From Cultural Heritage Data to Innovation
What needs to happen for cultural heritage data to become genuinely usable for research, innovation and the creative industries? The opening keynotes explore the evolving European data and AI landscape – from access to high-quality cultural heritage data to the infrastructures and computing capacities that can enable its reuse.
- Valentine Charles (Data Services Director, Europeana Foundation)
- Tomasz Umerle (PCSS, Development and Innovation Specialist) │ From Cultural Heritage Data to AI Innovation: What Europe’s AI Factories Can Unlock
The session concludes with a conversation about where the greatest opportunities – and remaining gaps – lie.
Roundtable moderated by Frédéric Kaplan
11.00 – 11.20 • Coffee break
11.20 – 11.40 • Heritage Innovation Marketplace: From Resources to Opportunities
Pitches
What technologies, services and expertise are already available to organisations that want to work creatively with cultural heritage? Short pitches introduce different resources and approaches from within the Time Machine ecosystem.
- La Tempesta (Marc Hernández Güell, Founder & Director)
- Inception (Matteo Bevilacqua)
- IN2 (Alexandru Stan, R&D Lead)
- Facts & Files (Frank Drauschke, Co-founder)
11.40 – 12.00 • Discussion – Connecting Cultural Heritage & the Creative Industries
Moderated by Frédéric Kaplan with the pitch speakers
The discussion then turns the perspective around: what do creative practitioners and cultural heritage organisations actually need – and how can existing technologies and expertise become the starting point for new collaborations?
12.00 – 13.30 • Joint Community Lunch
Continue conversations and make new connections over lunch. The joint lunch brings together participants from across the Time Machine and EIT Culture & Creativity communities ahead of the afternoon programme.
13.30 – 14.50 • What Can We Build with Heritage Data?
What happens when cultural heritage data moves beyond digitisation and becomes something people can explore, connect and reuse? Through rapid examples from Local Time Machines and other Time Machine initiatives, this session showcases applications ranging from urban history and photographic heritage to 3D reconstruction, storytelling and public engagement.
Rather than presenting projects in isolation, the session looks across them to identify transferable approaches, tools and ideas that others could build upon.
Utrecht Time Machine – Timeline 2018 to 2026 │ Anouk van Wijhe (Utrecht Time Machine)
Reflecting on 8 years of the Utrecht Time Machine. Highlighting recent technical innovations, the ambition of becoming a participatory platform, and collaborating with the Utrecht University course: Living Pasts: Exploring Futures.
The ATM Data Index: time- and location-based access to linked open heritage collections as a tool for urban planning and preservation │ Leon van Wissen (Amsterdam Time Machine, University of Amsterdam)
The ATM Data Index provides time and location-based access to items from linked open cultural heritage collections on the history of Amsterdam. By clicking on a tile on the map, a panel shows findings on that location from historical images (photographs, paintings, drawings from the City Archives of Amsterdam), newspaper items (historical newspaper collection of the National Library of the Netherlands) and person data (presently names listed on the Jewish Monument). The interface functions as an index that aggregates sources on specific locations from different collections, and that directly links to the sources at the collection owner. Presently, we explore the value of such a Data Index as a tool for urban planners, project developers, and citizens to identify socially and emotionally relevant historical landmarks that should be preserved in urban development projects.
Budapest Time Machine and what follows │ Emese Kún (Budapest City Archives)
Budapest Time Machine was launched in 2017 and has been part of the international Time Machine Organization network ever since. Developed within the framework of the Hungaricana Cultural Heritage Portal, it was among the very first platforms of this kind to provide large-scale, interconnected archival data in a spatial environment. Our aim is to facilitate direct access to reliable archival sources and to support informed engagement with the past. In this presentation we are also going to share our new development plans with the TMO community.
Recovering a Lost World’s Fair as Reusable 3D Data │ Erica Casareto (Turin 1911, PoliTO)
This project explores the digital reconstruction of the 1911 Turin World’s Fair, an important historical event whose pavilions were demolished after the exhibition and whose documentation is now dispersed across international archives. By combining archival research, 3D surveying, BIM, GIS and geodatabases, the project reconstructs both surviving buildings and lost pavilions through survey-based and document-based approaches. The resulting models are transformed into open, lightweight and georeferenced 3D data, enriched with structured metadata to ensure their discoverability, interoperability and reuse. Beyond preserving a lost architectural heritage, the project establishes a digital foundation for future cultural heritage applications and XR experiences, while enabling new ways of exploring the Fair through different historical perspectives.
Ajapaik.ee – 15 years of crowdsourcing 4D visual heritag │ Vahur Puik (Estonian Photographic Heritage Society, Museum of Photography – Tallinn City Museum)
Over 15 years, Ajapaik has assembled 1.2M historical photos, mobilizing citizens to geotag 750,000+ images, identify 109,000+ faces, and create 35,000+ rephotos. What are the key lessons from maintaining a participatory crowdsourcing platform for visual heritage while addressing chronic sustainability and institutional integration challenges?
From Map to Memory: Towards a Local Time Machine for Kosovo │ Rajmonda Jetullahu (CHwB Kosovo – Cultural Heritage without Borders)
CHwB Kosovo is developing a digital spatial platform that brings together cultural heritage inventories with broader information about Kosovo’s cities, including land use, urban functions, landmarks, visual documentation and other spatial datasets.
The platform allows us to move beyond viewing heritage as isolated points on a map and begin understanding places within their wider urban and cultural context. Alongside this, photogrammetry and 3D documentation are increasingly providing detailed digital records of individual heritage sites at specific moments in time.
The presentation will show the current state of this work and explore its next step: how these spatial, visual and three-dimensional records could be connected with historical maps, archival photographs and earlier documentation to introduce a temporal dimension.
This opens the possibility of evolving the existing CHwB Kosovo platform into a foundation for a Local Time Machine for Kosovo — moving from mapping places to connecting their data, evidence and stories through time.
A thousand years of landscape and human settlement in the Val de Bagnes: from archives to simulation │ Alexandre Luyet (Valais Wallis Time Machine)
The Valais Wallis Time Machine is reconstructing how the landscape of the Val de Bagnes and the way me people have inhabited it have evolved over the past millennium. The simulation brings together AI-processed cadastral records, toponyms collected with local dialect speakers, field surveys of traditional alpine buildings, and climate and forest evolution data. This talk presents the approach, first results, and how the outputs already feed public tools developed with the municipality and Verbier Tourisme.
14.50 – 15.10 • Coffee break
15.10 – 15.40 • European Opportunities: Building the Infrastructure for the Future
Europe is investing in new infrastructures, programmes and collaborative frameworks for cultural heritage and the creative industries. This session connects the dots between some of these developments and asks what they mean in practice for organisations looking for technologies, partnerships, knowledge and future opportunities.
Selected initiatives will illustrate how European projects can create resources that remain useful beyond the lifetime of individual funded projects.
- Kati Uusi Rauva (Director, EIT Culture & Creativity North Regional Hub) │ Funding opportunities within EIT Culture & Creativity: planned open calls
- Sander Münster (Secretary, Time Machine Organisation) │ European projects overview — open calls, opportunities, resources (INFINITY, 3D-4CH, ECHOES and more)
- Juha Henriksson (Director Music Archive Finland, Time Machine Partnership Manager & Ambassador) │ The Virtual Worlds Partnership
15:40–17:15 • Discovering the Time Atlas
From heritage resources to creative innovation. Introduction (15:40–15:50), then hands-on workshop (15:50–17:15). The emphasis isn’t only on how the Time Atlas works, but on what participants could build with it.
Theme — uploading, downloading & connecting local data through the Time Atlas API
- Introduction to the Time Atlas ecosystem & team
- Use cases from member cities · live upload demo · query & download workflows
- Metadata alignment · integration with existing local systems · future roadmap
17.15 – 17.30 • Closing Remarks
Reflections from the day, key connections and opportunities to take forward – and an invitation to continue the conversation across the Time Machine community.
17.30 onwards • Aperitivo & Cross-Ecosystem Networking
Time Machine Connect meets the EIT Culture & Creativity Open Days. Join participants from both communities for an informal aperitivo designed to create new connections across cultural heritage, technology and the creative industries.
Stay, meet someone outside your usual network and explore where the conversations started during the day could lead next