Interactive Systems And Bodily Engagement

When Horizons by Geert Mul was first presented in 2008 at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, it was positioned as an intervention within the museum’s historic collection. Rather than adding another static object to the gallery, the work introduced a system: a database of paintings selected from the museum’s holdings, all sharing a single visual motif: the horizon line.

Through custom software, these images were continuously recombined and projected onto a wall surface. Visitors activated the installation through movement; proximity altered the projected image, causing landscapes to fragment, dissolve, and reassemble. The work linked bodily presence to image behaviour, creating a feedback loop between viewer and system. In this sense, Horizons did not present landscape as representation, but as process.

Preservation as Reactivation

In 2017, Horizons reappeared within the context of Future Proof, a long-term research and preservation initiative developed by LI-MA in collaboration with Geert Mul. Rather than treating preservation as the storage of a fixed object, the project approaches media art as something that requires continuous care, interpretation, and technical adaptation in order to remain accessible over time.

The return of Horizons was therefore not a straightforward reinstallation, but an extensive process of technical and conceptual reactivation. As software environments, operating systems, and hardware infrastructures evolve, works such as Horizons risk becoming inaccessible, even when the original files themselves still exist. LI-MA’s role within this process involved reconstructing dependencies, analysing obsolete software environments, and working closely with Geert Mul to determine which aspects of the installation were essential to the work’s identity and behaviour.

This renewed presentation foregrounds a central question within media art conservation: what does it mean to preserve a work that depends on computational logic, custom software, and technologies designed to become outdated? Unlike traditional material artworks, interactive installations do not stabilise once installed. They remain dependent on systems that continuously change, break, or disappear.

This approach does not attempt to freeze the work in its original technical state. Instead, it considers continuity as something that may include adaptation. This involves reconstructing dependencies, interpreting outdated software environments, and, where necessary, translating functionality into contemporary systems while retaining core behaviour and intent.

Within this process, the role of the artist remains central. In collaboration with Mul, decisions were made not only about technical feasibility but also about which aspects of the work define its identity: the logic of image recombination, the responsiveness to movement, and the conceptual framing of collective visual memory drawn from art history.

From Early Digital Culture to Contemporary Reading

At the time of its first presentation, Horizons also reflected a specific moment in digital culture. Mul’s background as one of the early Dutch VJs is evident in the work’s real-time manipulation of imagery and its sensitivity to continuous visual flow. The installation can be read as an attempt to organise the expanding circulation of images emerging through internet culture, television, and digital photography at the time.

Revisited today, the work reads differently. The sense of uncontrolled image overflow has become structurally embedded in everyday digital environments. In this context, Horizons appears less as a response to early digital abundance and more as an early model of algorithmic visual behaviour – one that now feels familiar, perhaps even understated.

The preservation of such works also raises questions about audience experience across time. Visitors encountering Horizons today may not share the same technological or cultural reference points as those in 2008. Yet the core mechanism remains legible: movement producing change, images behaving as dynamic systems, and the horizon functioning as both motif and organising principle.

Pixel Pioneers

The reactivation of Horizons also takes place within the broader context of Pixel Pioneers, the first major exhibition by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen dedicated entirely to digital art. The exhibition traces how artists have used emerging digital technologies as artistic mediums capable of reshaping visual culture, social relations, and systems of perception. The exhibition also takes on the complex task of making digital art legible within museum frameworks, where works defined by software, interaction, and change resist fixed interpretation.

Within this context, Horizons is both a historical work and a living system. Originally commissioned by the museum in 2008, the installation brings together more than two hundred horizon images drawn from the museum collection, continuously reorganised through the movement of visitors. Nearly twenty years after its first presentation, the work now occupies a different position within digital culture: no longer a speculative experiment at the edge of technological art practice, but part of a longer genealogy of interactive and software-based media art.

By placing restored works alongside contemporary commissions and digital pioneers such as Suzanne Treister, Claudia Hart, and Feng Mengbo, the exhibition also highlights how early experiments with interactivity, gaming, databases, and algorithmic image systems continue to shape contemporary artistic practice.

LI-MA and the Conditions of Continuity

Within the broader scope of LI-MA’s preservation practice, Horizons illustrates how media art requires ongoing negotiation between stability and change. Preservation is not limited to safeguarding a fixed version of a work, but involves maintaining the conditions under which it can continue to function meaningfully.

As part of the Future Proof trajectory, the reactivation of Horizons demonstrates that longevity in media art is not a matter of resisting change, but of structuring it. The work persists not despite transformation, but through it.

Header image & thumbnail: Geert Mul, Horizons (2008). Collectie Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Schenking Geert Mul.. Photo by Bob Goedewaagen.