The exhibition part of the vmctl family
Showing born-digital art that should have died
The Exhibition VM Controller (evmctl) is free software that keeps historical computer-based artworks running in a museum — every day, all day, with nobody standing next to them. Each work lives inside a virtual machine: a faithful software copy of the old computer it was made for, running inside a modern one. That machine is captured at a tested, known-good moment, and whenever anything goes wrong — a crash, a freeze, a visitor leaving it in a strange state — it returns to that moment automatically, within seconds. Built at ZKM and proven over six months of daily, unattended operation. Published as ZKM Open Source (MIT), on GitHub since December 2025.
This is also where the family’s method, agentic restoration, deliberately ends. Working out what a piece needs and getting it to run again is done next door, by AI agents — programs that step through a task and decide for themselves what to examine next — supervised by a researcher. None of that comes into the gallery. What is installed for a show is the finished machine and one fixed snapshot of it; the controller only watches and restores. Nothing here judges, adapts, or improvises, so the work an audience sees on the last day of a run is the work that was signed off on the first.
