Software Art and Emulation

Apart from a short paper describing a heroic effort of Web archaeology, recreating Amsterdam's De Digitale Stadt, the whole second morning of iPRES2016 was devoted to the preservation of software and Internet-based art. It featured a keynote by Sabine Himmelsbach of the House of Electronic Arts (HeK) in Basel, and three papers using the bwFLA emulation technology to present preserved software art (proceedings in one PDF):

• A Case Study on Emulation-based Preservation in the Museum: Flusser Hypertext, Padberg et al.
• Towards a Risk Model for Emulation-based Preservation Strategies: A Case Study from the Software-based Art Domain, Rechert et al.
• Exhibiting Digital Art via Emulation – Boot-to-Emulator with the EMiL Kiosk System, Espenschied et al.

Preserving software art is an important edge case of software preservation. Each art piece is likely to have many more dependencies on specific hardware components, software environments and network services than mainstream software. Focus on techniques for addressing these dependencies in an emulated environment is useful in highlighting them. But it may be somewhat misleading, by giving an exaggerated idea of how hard emulating more representative software would be. Below the fold, I discuss these issues.