Das Kunstwerk als Black Box

A public talk at ZKM within A Story That Never Ends, the restoration project ZKM runs together with the Wüstenrot Stiftung, in which seven key works from the collection are being made publicly accessible again. I stepped in for Morgane Stricot and took the software side: what it takes to keep a software-based artwork running, and what we built to do it.

What the talk is about

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 fix the work. You must not do that.

The approach, in three moves:

• Never modify the work. Whatever is inside the box stays as it is. It is the artwork.
• Understand it first. Take the box apart analytically before touching anything around it: what it needs, what it calls, what it assumes about the machine it is on.
• Rebuild the environment underneath. Three layers below the work, reconstructed so the original can run unchanged.

That is the part that generalises. The specific tooling came out of the restoration work for Choose Your Filter! and is open source: the vmctl toolchain.

On the AI part

Some of the analysis is automated. The AI helps with it, a human has to decide. It is useful for the parts that are tedious and mechanical: picking apart a binary, working out what an old executable expects to find, surfacing the questions worth asking. It does not decide what the artwork is, what counts as authentic, or what may change. A conservator does.

Works shown

• Eden.Garden, Entropy8Zuper!, 2001, commissioned by SFMOMA for 010101. The work is a joint acquisition of ZKM and SFMOMA.
• Breaking the News, Marc Lee, 2007.

Talk and conversation in German, with Daniel Heiss and Marlies Peller.