Das Kunstwerk als Black Box

A public talk at ZKM within A Story That Never Ends, the restoration project ZKM runs together with the Wüstenrot Stiftung, in which seven key works from the collection are being made publicly accessible again. I stepped in for Morgane Stricot and took the software side: what it actually takes to keep a piece of software-based art running, and what we built to do it.

What the talk is about

A software-based artwork arrives as a black box. It runs — until the operating system under it, or the browser plugin inside it, or the web it talks to, stops existing. The instinct is to fix the work. That is exactly the thing you must not do.

The approach, in three moves:

• Never modify the work. Whatever is inside the box stays as it is. It is the artwork.
• Understand it first. Take the box apart analytically before touching anything around it — what it needs, what it calls, what it assumes about the machine it is on.
• Rebuild the environment underneath. Three layers below the work, reconstructed so the original can run unchanged.

That is the part that generalises. The specific tooling came out of the restoration work for Choose Your Filter! and is open source — the vmctl toolchain, plus the pieces described in exhibition-vm-controller and wayback-cache-proxy.

On the AI part

Some of the analysis is automated, and this is where I try to be precise rather than enthusiastic: the AI amplifies, the human decides. It is useful for the parts that are tedious and mechanical — picking apart a binary, mapping what an old executable expects to find, surfacing the questions worth asking. It does not decide what the artwork is, what counts as authentic, or what may change. A conservator does.

Works shown

• Eden.Garden 1.1 — Entropy8Zuper!, 2001, commissioned by SFMOMA for 010101. The version restored at ZKM is a joint acquisition of ZKM and SFMOMA.
• Breaking the News — Marc Lee, 2007.

Roughly twenty minutes and then a conversation, in German, with Daniel Heiss and Marlies Peller. For the longer arc of how this work started, there is the GPN24 talk; for why net art dies in the first place, netart-extinction.