Choose Your Filter!
Restoration of 30 years of browser art from the 1990s-2020s. Many works considered permanently lost are now functional.
Role: Media art conservation and technical development
About the Project
Choose Your Filter! is a large-scale restoration project for browser-based artworks spanning three decades — from the 1990s to the 2020s. Many of these works were considered permanently lost, dependent on obsolete plugins, defunct servers, and outdated web technologies. The exhibition runs from February 1 to August 24, 2025 at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Among the restored works, Eden.Garden by Entropy8Zuper! (Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn) was selected for presentation at Rhizome World in New York City.
Technical Challenges
- Plugin emulation — restoring Flash, Java Applet, and Shockwave content in modern browsers
- Server reconstruction — rebuilding backend services required by server-side artworks
- Browser compatibility — ensuring functionality in current browsers while preserving the original experience
- Historical browser environments — recreating the rendering contexts of Internet Explorer 4/8 and other obsolete browsers
Collaboration
The project was developed in collaboration with a KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) research project on digital art conservation, with curators Inge Hinterwaldner and Daniela Hönigsberg (KIT) and Laura C. Schmidt (ZKM). Credit: “Media art conservators and technical development: Daniel Heiss, Marc Schütze, Matthieu Vlaminck.”