Keeping Net Art Alive: Self-Healing VMs and a Caching Wayback Proxy

Peer-reviewed full paper at iPRES 2026, the 22nd International Conference on Digital Preservation (Copenhagen, 21–25 September 2026), presented on 22 September in Session 53, Artworks Rescue and Repair. A companion workshop, Keeping Net Art Alive: Open-Source Tools for Self-Healing Exhibition Systems, was accepted for the same conference.

The problem

Exhibiting historical browser-based artworks means solving two problems that only show up at scale: obsolete software environments have to run reliably for months, and the historical web content the works depend on has to stay reachable even when its source goes down.

The paper reports on Choose Your Filter! Browser Art since the Beginnings of the World Wide Web (ZKM, February–August 2025). Eight works from 1997–2003 ran on twelve dedicated computers in Windows XP virtual machines for more than six months.

What came out of it

A VM controller built for a single artwork — Entropy8Zuper!’s Eden.Garden (2001), which needed a discontinued 3D plugin, a dead server and a dead browser — turned out to be reusable across all eight works without fundamental changes. When Internet Archive outages left three archive-dependent works showing blank screens, the limit of that approach became just as clear: reliable runtime infrastructure is not enough without reliable content delivery.

Two open-source tools resulted, both MIT-licensed:

• Exhibition VM Controller — snapshot-based error recovery and modular guest monitoring.
• Wayback Cache Proxy — prefetch crawling, two-tier caching and WARC export.

Findings from six months of operation

• Every error inside the VM was handled automatically. Frozen guests, crashed applications, deadlocked generative logic and abandoned visitor sessions all reverted to the tested snapshot within seconds. After two power cuts, all twelve systems came back to their expected state with no one touching them.
• Every human intervention was caused by something outside the VM. One third-party library wrapping DuckDuckGo’s undocumented API needed eleven updates in six months; Internet Archive outages took down three works at once; cookie banners on live websites broke automated browsing.
• Dependency profile predicts maintenance. Fully offline works were close to maintenance-free; works on cached archive content can reach near-offline stability with prefetching; works on live internet services stay fragile whatever the infrastructure.
• The snapshot is the conservation unit. The complete Eden.Garden setup was copied to another computer and ran at Rhizome World in New York without re-restoration, operated by staff who had not worked on it.

The longer journal version of this work is the IEEE Computer cover feature.