This weekend I gave two talks at GPN24, the Gulaschprogrammiernacht — the annual Chaos Computer Club gathering in Karlsruhe that takes over the ZKM and HfG buildings for a long weekend of hacking, lightning talks, and the best vegetarian goulash in Baden-Württemberg. Both talks are now up on media.ccc.de, so here’s a short map of what each one was about.

Wie steuert man eigentlich ein Museum?

Recording · solo

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 — as I put it, “Mr. Projektor, Mr. Audio, Mr. Computer” — and a lot of those hats are mine and my colleague Daniel Heiß’s.

The talk is an origin story, told the way it actually happened: a work makes trouble, we solve it by hand, then we build something so we never have to do it by hand again. Light. Network-controllable power sockets — ANEL boxes spoken to over UDP, then NET-IO driven by a bit of curl. The projectors that finally speak PJLink. SSH as the universal “then I can do anything” escape hatch. Windows works held together with 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. And after ten years of private scripts, the part I’m proudest of: “Public money? Public code.” — open-sourcing the central switchboard as the Gallery Controller.

Then the specialities, which is where the fun is: time-slice budgets that let a kinetic work run seven minutes at a stretch instead of grinding itself to death; “satellite” nodes — really just a little Python script — for rooms sitting 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 is the human turn: with headphones no longer an option, we needed contactless presence detection — which is how we ended up on cheap €20 LiDAR sensors, and that grew into the 50-plus-sensor setup in Renaissance 3.0.

It lands on the line I closed with: if I do my job right, nobody notices I’m there — you just get to enjoy the art.

Choose Your Filter! — Vom Forschungsprojekt zur Ausstellung

Recording · with Inge Hinterwaldner

The second talk I gave together with Inge Hinterwaldner, and it tells the longer arc: 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 Choose Your Filter!, the exhibition at ZKM.

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. That means meeting each work where it is — Flash here, an ancient Internet Explorer there — putting it in a virtual machine, and building a snapshot-revert system so that when something drifts or crashes, the machine quietly resets itself to a known-good state (exhibition-vm-controller). And when a work depends on a live web that no longer answers, pointing it at a local cache of the old web instead (wayback-cache-proxy).

If you’ve read the other posts here, you’ll recognize the tools — this talk is the story of why they exist, told from the exhibition side rather than the engineering side.

Watch them

• Wie steuert man eigentlich ein Museum?
• Choose Your Filter! — Vom Forschungsprojekt zur Ausstellung

Both are in German. Thanks to Entropia e.V. and everyone who runs GPN — it’s a rare event where you can talk about museum infrastructure to a room that asks genuinely hard questions about it.