When the Internet Breaks Art: A Self-Healing Virtualization Framework

Cover feature in the Software Engineering in Generative Art special issue of IEEE Computer (September 2026), guest-edited by Benoit Baudry, Patrícia Falcão, and Erik Fredericks.

What it is about

Browser-based artworks that depend on the Internet create a specific preservation problem: they need historical browsers, plug-ins, runtime libraries, and external online services. When a service disappears, an API changes, or a plug-in stops working, the artwork fails — even though the original code is untouched.

The article describes the approach that came out of the restoration work for Choose Your Filter! Browser Art since the Beginnings of the World Wide Web (ZKM, February to August 2025): virtual machines running historical operating systems, snapshot-based recovery, monitoring that observes failure states from outside the artwork, and local replacement services for online sources that no longer exist. The system returns each work to a known, verified state on its own — without modifying the artwork itself.

Two works carry the argument:

• Eden.Garden — turns HTML structures into 3D worlds and avatar movements. Could be made fully independent of the live web.
• Subfusion — processes images and audio from the Internet into audiovisual collages. Could not be decoupled, and required ongoing maintenance as the external services kept changing.

The difference between the two is the actual point: for generative net art, archiving code is not preservation. What has to be preserved is the historical system, the network environment, and the data sources working together — plus, for museum operation, a recovery path that non-technical staff can operate without diagnosis.

Citation

M. Schütze, “When the Internet Breaks Art: A Self-Healing Virtualization Framework,” Computer, vol. 59, no. 9, pp. 18–26, Sept. 2026, doi: 10.1109/MC.2026.3691454.

The full text is on IEEE Xplore. Copyright is held by IEEE, so the typeset PDF is not hosted here.