Choose Your Filter! — Vom Forschungsprojekt zur Ausstellung

The longer arc, told together with Inge Hinterwaldner: how a multi-year KIT research project on artistic web browsers (browsers built as artworks across three decades of the World Wide Web) turned into the Choose Your Filter! exhibition at ZKM.

What the talk is about

Inge covers the research and the art history. I cover the eight months before the opening: getting decades-old, software-based artworks to run autonomously on a gallery floor for the whole length of a show.

• Meet each work where it is: Flash here, an ancient Internet Explorer there. Works that need an old system go into a virtual machine.
• Snapshot-revert as self-healing: a system that quietly resets a machine to a known-good state the moment a work drifts or crashes (exhibition-vm-controller).
• Keep the old web reachable: when a work depends on a live web that no longer answers, it fails. That is why wayback-cache-proxy, a local cache of the old web, exists.

The talk tells from the exhibition side why those tools exist. For the broader question of why net art dies in the first place, there is netart-extinction.