vmctl
Open-source toolchain for examining, reviving and permanently exhibiting born-digital art, without modifying the artwork itself.
Role: Developer
About the project
A software-based artwork arrives as a black box. It runs until the operating system under it, the browser plugin inside it or the web it talks to stops existing. The instinct is then to repair the work. You must not do that.
vmctl is the toolchain built around the opposite approach, developed out of the restoration work for Choose Your Filter! at ZKM:
- Never modify the work. Whatever is inside the box stays as it is. It is the artwork.
- Understand it first. Take it apart analytically before touching anything around it.
- Rebuild the environment underneath. Three layers below the work, reconstructed so the original runs unchanged.
The pipeline
An unknown work goes through three stages (understand, revive, exhibit):
- artwork-autopsy: opens the black box and produces a profile plus a revival runbook.
- research-vm-controller: the workbench: puts the work into a matching historical environment and revives it there.
- exhibition-vm-controller: takes the proven work and carries it self-healing through the exhibition.
Where it stands
exhibition-vm-controller and wayback-cache-proxy are published. In the exhibition, one VM base carried eight works through roughly six months of continuous public display.
MIT licensed. Hub at vmctl.org, code under github.com/zkmkarlsruhe.