Chapter 6 · 6 of 6

Open source, citable, and credited

evmctl is released by ZKM under the MIT licence, with a DOI and two peer-reviewed papers documenting the approach and six months of operation.

The exhibition-vm-controller is ZKM Open Source, free to use and adapt under the MIT licence. It is meant to be picked up by other museums and collections facing the same obsolescence problem.

The code

• 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 (a DOI is a permanent, citable identifier for the software).
• Wayback Cache Proxy (MIT) — local caching, HTTPS interception, and web-archive replay for legacy browsers. github.com/zkmkarlsruhe/wayback-cache-proxy

The whole approach — the fleet, the lifecycle, and six months of operation — is written up in the project whitepaper (PDF); full docs live at docs.vmctl.org. Questions, or want to use it in your institution? Write to hello@vmctl.org.

Papers

Two peer-reviewed papers document the approach and six months of operation (accepted; final author preprints):

• When the Internet Breaks Art: A Self-Healing Virtualization Framework. Marc Schütze, IEEE Computer (cover feature), 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.

How to cite

@software{schuetze2025exhibition,
  author       = {Sch{\"u}tze, Marc},
  title        = {{Exhibition VM Controller: Snapshot-Based
                  Conservation of Digital Artworks}},
  year         = {2025},
  organization = {ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe},
  url          = {https://github.com/zkmkarlsruhe/exhibition-vm-controller},
  note         = {DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18652760}
}

To understand a work first

evmctl shows a verified work; it is the wrong tool for figuring one out. For that — opening a work up, watching it, and authoring a conservation plugin — see the Research VM Controller, and the analysis module that examines an unknown work before a session begins. A work flows along one lifecycle — analysis → workbench → exhibition — and evmctl is the last stage. The research controller already builds on the shared core, vmctl-core; bringing evmctl onto it, so a verified result promotes from the workbench into the exhibition runner automatically, is the planned convergence. All three are members of the vmctl family.