Emulations provide an excellent method of preserving attributes of a software-based artwork for both exhibition and conservation. The inclusion of Tatsuo Miyajima’s software-based installation, Floating Time (Marine Blue) (2000) in the exhibition The Light Show at the Denver Art Museum in 2019, served as an excellent opportunity to research emulation possibilities of the artwork’s original computing environment. After many attempts with various software applications, the open source, command-line software QEMU created an emulated version with the highest fidelity to the original artwork.

This poster illustrates the process at the Denver Art Museum from working with the components acquired in 2003 to the emulated version of Floating Time. Part of that process was the digital preservation of the original exhibition computer’s hard drive, which, once saved to the museum’s digital repository, was used to build a virtual hard drive for the emulation. The process of creating an accurate emulated version of the artwork also informed the process of building the computers used to exhibit Floating Time (Marine Blue) in 2019 through 2020.