The mission of the DOCAM Research Alliance has been to identify and implement five research axes and propose tools, guides and methods that contribute to the preservation of the media arts heritage. The axes are conservation, documentation, cataloguing, history of technologies and terminology.

DOCAM was entrusted with a mandate to examine the factors that threaten the technological arts heritage and to put forward solutions and tools to allow artists, collaborators, museum professionals and collectors to better document and preserve this heritage. The causes of this fragility are many and varied. Most notable among them is the increasingly rapid obsolescence of the technologies used in these artworks. It is this obsolescence that is driving us to re-examine the factors that define the authenticity and integrity of new media works and recognize that they are based on variable media. It therefore becomes clear that the essence of a new media work is found more in its behaviour and the effects it generates than in the materiality of its components.

These works also often include transient features that leave them unstable and in a state of constant transformation. These features lead us to view the works as having a variable nature, in that they are subject to diverse changes, transformations or mutations through the course of their lifespan.