Guest Post: Time Travel Through Our Digital Past with Nicole Savoy

As part of an exploration of emulation technologies for preserving digital cultural heritage through projects like Time Travel Through Our Digital Past (supported by the Foundation for Art, Culture, and History (SKKG)), HEK (Haus der Elektronischen Künste) partnered with Rhizome on December 14th, 2025 to host the workshop TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art.

In this edition of TechBrunch, Claudia Röck, Conservator of the HEK’s media art collection and Dragan Espenschied, Preservation Director at Rhizome (NYC) shared how they use emulation as a sustainable method of preservation for the diverse born-digital artworks they care for. Workshop participants including artists, designers, and students and professionals in the field of media preservation restored an artwork in an emulator and explored cultural history through an outdated operating system.

TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art, 14.12.25. Photo: Nicolas Gysin.

The HEK’s collection holds 117 media artworks created in Switzerland between 1983 and 2024, 30 to 40 of which are born-digital artworks, meaning they are created entirely with digital tools and need specific digital environments (composed of various software) to function. Examples include digital audio visual, animated, software-based or generative artworks, net- or web-based works, as well as those produced using virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), or AI- and algorithm-driven processes. 

Overview of HEK Collection. Screenshot from Claudia Röck’s presentation.

Artists use digital tools in a variety of ways to create unique born-digital artworks. As these tools develop and change, older versions become incompatible with contemporary computer systems, making many artworks increasingly difficult to view and experience. Born-digital works created in or before the early 2000s are especially vulnerable to this kind of obsolescence. Röck points out the importance of emulation as a preservation method for making these otherwise lost treasures accessible.

Preserving Digital Ecosystems

Restoring a born-digital artwork via emulation often involves reconstructing whole software environments and can be an arduous process depending on the complexity of the work and the availability of its files, media, and the software it was built with. Many more born-digital artworks exist than operating systems and software. This means that with a large collection, it is  probable that several artworks will require similar combinations of these tools.

With over 2,200 born-digital artworks in the ArtBase, Rhizome’s approach to preservation is to focus on preserving, not only individual artworks themselves, but the operating systems and other software that artworks in the collection need to work. By preserving these digital ecosystems, artworks depending on the same environments can be restored in groups, preventing the likelihood of repeating preservation processes if treated individually.

Emulation as a Translation of Symbols

Espenschied describes how all computers, including modern laptops, smartphones, and decades-old mainframes, are fundamentally the same – machines that read symbols and interpret them as instructions. Performance and scale can be affected by differences in processors, RAM, storage capacity, or peripherals but at their core all computers are symbol-processing machines. 

Operating systems act as mediators between a computer’s physical hardware and other software programs, defining the symbolic environments these programs are designed to be compatible with. Software tells the computer which symbols to read, how to manipulate those symbols, and how to interpret the resulting data. Obsolescence can occur when this symbolic environment is altered, for example, with updates to operating systems or hardware architectures.

This is where emulation comes in handy. Emulators are software programs that map or translate the symbols and instructions from one computer system (the guest) to another (the host). This allows programs built for the guest to be executed on the host computer. By enabling a computer system to virtually run or host another, emulation highlights how computation is at its core an abstract translation of symbols. 

Xerox Star 8010. Screenshot from Dragan Espenschied’s Presentation during TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art, 14.12.25.

Restoring Every Icon

Emulators can recreate outdated digital environments, providing access to old software, games, or born-digital artworks that rely on these systems. For example, in the late 90s to early 2000s, before modern web standards, many artists built Java Applets which enabled animations and interactivity on websites. Java Applets require a Java virtual machine (JVM) and a browser with a compatible Java plugin. An early version of Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1), released in 2002, included a Microsoft JVM by default. Later versions of Windows XP removed this JVM and required manual installation. Emulating Windows XP SP1 with a period-appropriate browser can provide access to these obsolete Java Applets.

Workshop participants installed Windows XP SP1 in the UTM emulator (hosted on contemporary Mac computers) to restore the artwork Every Icon (1997) by John F. Simon, Jr. which exists in both the HEK’s collection and Rhizome’s ArtBase. The artwork consists of a Java Applet that runs through every possible combination of patterns of black and white squares on a 32 x 32 grid. The work’s duration is described as 300 trillion years since that is how long it would take for the program to run through all 4.3 trillion possibilities. 

Every Icon. John F. Simon, Jr., 1997. Part of HEK’s collection.

Software as Time Capsules of Digital Culture

After installing Windows XP SP1 and accessing Every Icon, participants were given time to explore the legacy operating system. A round robin session revealed games like 3D Pinball, drawings participants made in Microsoft Paint, and Windows Media Player skins not found in later versions. Operating systems and applications embody the aesthetic, technical, and social language of their time. Features like media player skins, wallpapers, system sounds, sample media, and early browser behaviors provide historical context for artworks created within those environments.

Windows XP SP1 reflects a period when software still held some traces of the people who built it. Earlier, when development teams were smaller and software production less corporatized, it was more common to find fingerprints left by programmers—such as stock videos and audio files, playful error messages, or Easter eggs embedded in code. These elements reveal the human side of software development and have gradually diminished over time through increasing standardization. Emulating software is not only a method for conserving born-digital artworks but also a way to preserve these important cultural histories.

Alienware “Invader” Windows Media Player skin. Windows XP, ca. 2001-2007. Screenshot from Windows XP emulator during TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art Workshop.

3D PinBall for Windows – Space Cadet. Windows XP, ca. 2001-2007. Screenshot from Windows XP emulator during TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art Workshop.

Emulation for All

Beyond providing insight into historical digital environments and artworks, emulation plays an important role in making digital history publicly accessible. Emulators enable artists, researchers, programmers, and enthusiasts to explore different computer systems and early web and software environments, experiment with new platforms, and run legacy computer games and applications.

A whole world of well-documented open-source emulators exists for anyone to explore. A small selection of those requiring minimal to moderate expertise includes UTM, which allows users to install and run multiple operating systems on a Mac; DOSBox for running MS-DOS software; and Basilisk II and SheepShaver for classic Apple systems. Curated software collections available through online archives such as the Internet Archive are a useful resource for recreating and emulating digital environments. For those interested in experiencing a wide range of legacy computer systems without the need to set up their own emulators, the Internet Archive provides in-browser emulation for dozens of historical platforms. 

The scope and accessibility of these resources, along with the practical experience gained by participants of the TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art workshop show that emulation is not limited to specialists but is available to anyone curious about engaging in digital cultural history. Follow along as the HEK continues to explore the use of emulation to preserve digital culture, with more TechBrunch events to come!

TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art, 14.12.25. Photo: Nicolas Gysin.