vmctl

Three stages, from a dead bundle of bytes to a piece on the gallery wall

Autopsy — analysis

Unpack an artwork bundle, work out what the work is, what runtime it needs, and — crucially for a broken piece — every network host it reaches. An agentic analyst maps the crucial parts and writes a conservation report. Modern web art too — Electron apps and browser extensions have the same preservation shape: a runtime frozen at one moment, servers that may be gone.

How the autopsy works →

Research — the workbench

Clone an era-correct virtual machine (Windows 98 SE … 11, Mac OS 9.2.2, and Mac OS X Tiger and Snow Leopard), boot the artwork inside it, capture its network traffic, and fix, verify, and save the running state.

Working in the VM →

Exhibition — the locked runner

The north star: a verified work gets locked into a frozen, reproducible, long-running exhibition instance a museum can switch on every morning without touching the research tooling.

exhibition-vm-controller on GitHub →

Where this actually stands

The working, documented system today is parts 1 and 2 — autopsy + the rvmc research workbench. Part 3, the automatic hand-off to the exhibition controller, is the direction, not a current feature. These docs describe what works now and flag what’s planned.

The one thing to understand about cost

Running old software is cheap — a VM is a VM. Reading and understanding an artwork is where the cost lives, because that is done by a large language model, and every serious work means a lot of tokens. So the deal is simple:

We provide the infrastructure. You bring your own AI.

Point the system at your OpenAI-compatible endpoint and your key, and you pay your provider directly for what your artwork costs to analyze.

Start here

Bring your artwork The full lifecycle, step by step.

Bring your own AI Why, how, which providers, and the security model.

Install & deploy Self-hosting and deployment.

Read the whitepaper The full technical picture (PDF).

The vmctl family

These docs are one site in a small family. Start at the hub, or jump to a sibling:

vmctl.org — the hub Where born-digital conservation came from, where it's going, and how to help.

autopsy.vmctl.org The artwork-autopsy analysis stage — its own home.

research.vmctl.org The research workbench (rvmc) project page, and the whitepaper host.

exhibition.vmctl.org The exhibition-vm-controller — the locked, long-running gallery runner.

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vmctl is a project of ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Head researcher: Marc Schütze. MIT licensed. Source under the ZKM org at github.com/zkmkarlsruhe.