As the man began to swing the sledgehammer, I closed my eyes. Even though I knew that the 3,000 year old statue he was aiming at was already destroyed, and that this grainy video was merely a triumphal boast about the destruction, I could not watch as the sledgehammer made contact.

In early 2015, the Islamic State (IS) flooded its social media channels with similar videos and images of its deliberate destruction of archeological sites and ancient artwork from Nimrud, Hatra, Palmyra, and others of the thousands of cultural landmarks in Iraq and Syria. As an art historian, I mourned the destruction. As a lawyer, I feared what IS would do with the profits it was making from the antiquities it spared from destruction in order to sell them on the international black market. As a professor of art law and art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York), I decided to put together an exhibition.

The Missing: Rebuilding the Past (www.themissingexhibit), which runs through February 5, 2016, is the first exhibit to showcase the efforts of artists and scholars to resist ISIS and other forms of destruction of the past through creative and innovative reactions, protests, and reconstructions. This Friday, January 22, we are holding a symposium to accompany the exhibition (http://www.themissingexhibit.com/symposium/). The symposium recognizes that the same digital and internet technologies that insurgent groups such as IS are using for propaganda, recruitment, funding, and strategizing can also be used to monitor, preserve, and even stop the destruction of cultural heritage. This symposium offers a roundtable conversation among scholars, artists, and technological pioneers working at the leading edge of digital cultural heritage. They will discuss the promises and perils of new technologies – what will we gain? what might we lose? – as well as explain their visions for the most crucial projects and the most interesting technologies and strategies.

Readers of this blog – those interested in art law – have much to contribute to this fight against destruction. For example, we can imagine those boastful videos some day being played in a courtroom, as evidence during a trial for war crimes or crimes against humanity. I encourage you to come to the exhibition and symposium and share your other ideas and concerns in this battle, important to us all.

Erin L. Thompson (@artcrimeprof) holds both a PhD and a JD and is America’s only full-time professor of art crime. She studies the damage done to humanity’s shared heritage through looting, theft, and the deliberate destruction of art. She has discussed art crime topics in The New York Times and on CNN, NPR, Al Jazeera America, and the Freakonomics podcast. Her book, Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors, is forthcoming from Yale University Press (May 2016).