Chapter 3 · 3 of 6

Choose Your Filter! — eight works, twelve computers, six months

evmctl was not designed in the abstract. It grew out of one hard artwork and then ran a whole exhibition’s worth of historical net-art, daily, for half a year.

In 2025 the exhibition Choose Your Filter! Browser Art since the Beginnings of the World Wide Web opened at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, in cooperation with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. It needed twenty-four browser-based artworks spanning 1996–2025 to run daily for more than six months. Eight of them, from the late 1990s and early 2000s, depended on software ecosystems that no longer exist.

The work that needed everything rebuilt

The hardest was Eden.Garden (2001) by Entropy8Zuper! — a browser-based 3D environment that reads HTML pages as input for three-dimensional worlds. It required Pulse3D (a discontinued browser plugin — an add-on the browser needs before it can display the work), Internet Explorer, a server-side Perl script that no longer existed, and websites as they looked around 2001. Reviving it meant finding the abandoned plugin, reverse-engineering the dead server’s behaviour, and mirroring every external dependency locally — until the work believed it was talking to the historical internet while every request was served from controlled, offline storage.

Eden.Garden (2001) running again inside Windows XP with Internet Explorer and the Pulse3D plugin — the restored work as exhibited. — Figure 1. *Eden.Garden* (2001) running again inside Windows XP with Internet Explorer and the Pulse3D plugin — the restored work as exhibited.

From one fix to a framework

Making the work run once was not enough; it had to survive months of daily public use. The solution — a tested ready snapshot and an automatic revert on any failure — turned out to be general. The same framework, without fundamental changes, then ran all eight historical works across twelve computers, booting each straight into its artwork, full-screen, and silently resetting it on any error.

The exhibition Choose Your Filter! at ZKM, Karlsruhe (2025) — where evmctl was built and proven over six months of daily, unattended operation. — Figure 2. The exhibition *Choose Your Filter!* at ZKM, Karlsruhe (2025) — where evmctl was built and proven over six months of daily, unattended operation.

Real-world testing Six months of continuous operation · twelve VMs running simultaneously · automatic recovery from every observed failure mode · no manual intervention required during exhibition hours. One restored work even travelled: copied to another machine and re-deployed at Rhizome in New York, run by staff who had never touched the original.

But a machine that starts and heals is only half the battle. Most of these works expected to talk to the network — to servers that are now gone. Reviving that vanished network is the next chapter.