Chapter 9 · 9 of 9

Lineage, papers, and how to cite

rvmc is the research evolution of work that began in a museum exhibition and is documented in two peer-reviewed papers.

Both tools described here grew out of Choose Your Filter! (ZKM, February–August 2025, in cooperation with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). Eight historical works ran for six months on twelve computers, and two open-source tools resulted.

The two tools

• Exhibition VM Controller (MIT) — self-healing VMs with snapshot revert and in-guest monitoring. github.com/zkmkarlsruhe/exhibition-vm-controller · DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18652760
• Wayback Cache Proxy (MIT) — local caching, HTTPS interception, and web-archive replay for legacy browsers. github.com/zkmkarlsruhe/wayback-cache-proxy

Papers

Two peer-reviewed papers document the approach and six months of operation. Both are accepted; final author preprints, not yet formally published.

• When the Internet Breaks Art: A Self-Healing Virtualization Framework. Marc Schütze, IEEE Computer (cover feature, Software Engineering in Generative Art), 2026. DOI 10.1109/MC.2026.3691454.
• Keeping Net Art Alive: Self-Healing VMs and a Caching Wayback Proxy from Six Months of Exhibition Operation. Marc Schütze, iPRES 2026.

Project whitepaper

A longer, plain-language write-up of vmctl’s concept, architecture, and conservation method is available as a working draft, updated toward the v1 release.

Download the whitepaper (PDF, draft)

How to cite

@software{schuetze2026vmctl,
  author = {Sch{\"u}tze, Marc},
  title  = {{vmctl: A Browser-Based, AI-Assisted Research
            Workbench for Born-Digital Art}},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://vmctl.org},
  organization = {{ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe}},
  note   = {ZKM Open-Source project; builds on the ZKM
            exhibition-vm-controller (MIT, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18652760)}
}