The research part of the vmctl family

Keeping born-digital art alive

The Research VM Controller is a workbench for bringing born-digital artworks back to life — used from an ordinary web browser, no installation needed. Much contemporary art exists only as software, built for operating systems, plugins, and servers that are now gone. The workbench rebuilds the old computer such a work needs as a virtual machine (a complete computer running as software inside a modern one), so a researcher can open the work up, watch it run, and understand it well enough to conserve it. It is one member of the vmctl family of open tools.

The approach behind the family is agentic restoration: AI agents — programs that work through a task step by step, deciding for themselves what to look at next — do the understanding and drive the revival, under a researcher’s eye. That stops at the gallery door. What a museum finally shows is a fixed, unchanging machine with no AI running inside it, so the work behaves the same on the first morning of an exhibition and on the hundredth.

An official ZKM open-source project, developed by Marc Schütze at ZKM, building on ZKM’s open-source exhibition-vm-controller.
A guided introduction for artists, conservators, researchers, and students — no prior knowledge assumed.

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The exhibition Choose Your Filter! at ZKM, Karlsruhe (2025) — where the tools behind vmctl were built and proven over six months of daily operation. — Figure 1. The exhibition *Choose Your Filter!* at ZKM, Karlsruhe (2025) — where the tools behind vmctl were built and proven over six months of daily operation.

The reading path — 9 short chapters

1 The problem A growing part of our cultural record runs only as code, on platforms that are already gone. Conserving it is not a filing problem; it is a running problem. 2 A real case One artwork needed a dead plugin, a dead server, and a dead browser. Solving it once produced a framework that ran eight works for half a year. 3 The conservation model The whole approach rests on one move: treat the artwork and its environment as an immutable object, and put everything that changes around it. 4 The workbench Clone a faithful period machine, drive it in your browser, watch what it reaches for, save its state before you experiment, and write down what you learn. 5 A guided session From an empty project to a documented conservation plugin: a research session in the workbench, end to end. 6 Inside the machines Every project starts from a ready-made, verified copy of a period computer — a golden image. What that means, what each base carries, and which systems are covered today. 7 Under the hood (for builders) How rvmc is put together, and what an institution actually stands up to run it. For implementers — you can use the workbench without reading a word of it. 8 Where this sits vmctl doesn't start from scratch. What the field has already solved, and the one stubbornly manual step this work automates. 9 Research & papers rvmc is the research evolution of work that began in a museum exhibition and is documented in two peer-reviewed papers.