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 — and put it in 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, point it at a local cache of the old web instead (wayback-cache-proxy).

It’s the story of why those tools exist, told from the exhibition side rather than the engineering side. For the broader “why net art dies in the first place,” there’s netart-extinction.