Wie steuert man eigentlich ein Museum?

A media-art museum, from the technical side, is a building full of projectors, computers, sensors and custom electronics that all have to come up in the morning and behave all day. At ZKM there’s a specialist for nearly every trade, on stage “Mr. Projektor, Mr. Audio, Mr. Computer”. A lot of those hats are worn by my colleague Daniel Heiss and me.

What the talk is about

It is an origin story, told the way it happened: a work makes trouble, we solve it by hand, then we build something so we never have to do it by hand again. The tour runs from the very first hacks to today’s central control:

• Switching, the hard way first: light, then network-controllable power sockets (ANEL over UDP, then NET-IO driven by a bit of curl), then the projectors that finally speak PJLink, and SSH as the universal “then I can do anything” escape hatch.
• Keeping Windows works alive: process watchdogs that notice a crash and click the thing back to life, including the one that first has to get past an Age-of-Empires login screen.
• “Public money? Public code.”: after ten years of private scripts, open-sourcing the central switchboard as GalleryControl.
• The specialities: time-slice budgets that let a kinetic work run seven minutes at a stretch instead of grinding itself to death; “satellite” nodes (a little Python script) for rooms on their own subnet; a Flipper Zero to record and replay the infrared for a projector that speaks no PJLink and has no network at all; and the genuinely large compressed-air installations that the same logic switches on and off.
• COVID, the human turn: with headphones no longer an option, we needed contactless presence detection, which is how we ended up on cheap LiDAR sensors. Bernd Lintermann built his tracking system on top of that, with more than 50 sensors in Renaissance 3.0.

My closing line was: if I do my job right, nobody notices I’m there. You just get to enjoy the art.