In 2015, during an artist's residency in Vermont, Jeroen Jongeleen ran in a circle for eight hours. Attached to a nail in the ground by a 5.5 metre string, he traced the same circumference repeatedly until a path was worn into the earth. The resulting aerial footage, which had been shot by drone after the fact, with the artist re-enacting the action, was first presented as photographs. Two years later, in 2017, the work became something else: an internet artwork, distributed online, accessible to anyone.

The decision to put Running a Circle Clockwise on the internet was not merely logistical. Jongeleen has described being motivated, in part, by an incident involving a fellow artist whose institution blocked him from showing his own work elsewhere. By making the piece available as a website and not on a proprietary video platform, which would have required relinquishing intellectual rights, the work could not be contained by any single collecting body.

That the work can be shown in an exhibition, while remaining publicly accessible online is not incidental. For Jongeleen, putting the work online was never only a question of distribution. On the internet, the work stays available to anyone, beyond any one institution's grasp. This is the piece’s “rebellious radicality” – and the power of the internet as the chosen tool.

Preserving the browser turned out to be technically demanding, as it was not simply about keeping a video playing. Its continued, public accessibility online, at a moment when the infrastructure that makes that possible is shifting beneath it, turned out to be technically demanding.

The Autoplay Problem

When LI-MA began working on Running a Circle Clockwise as part of its Collaborative Infrastructure project, the central challenge was immediately apparent. The work uses audio of the artist's breath, recorded via a microphone worn while running, and it is distributed over the internet. Both of these facts created a problem that had nothing to do with the artwork's age or fragility, and everything to do with how browsers had changed around it.

In the early 2010s, browser developers introduced the autoplay block: a mechanism designed to prevent spam, pop-ups, and intrusive advertisements from playing sound on load. For Running a Circle Clockwise, this meant that when a visitor arrived at the website, the browser would either mute the video or refuse to play it at all. The work's original programmer, Thorben Jäger, had anticipated this in 2016 by creating a script that loaded the video in a container, preventing the browser from recognising it as a video upon load. That fix endured for several years. By around 2022, updated browsers had caught up.

Boijmans had attempted an interim solution at that point, adjusting the HTML so that the video would play muted. The tab title was also changed to reflect the year of treatment. But muting the work in order to make it function was not, from a conservation standpoint, the same as preserving it. Audio places the viewer inside the artist's body, inside the act of running. It is what grounds the viewer in the bodily experience which the work documents. A muted version keeps the work accessible while altering one of its significant properties. It is an instance of the recurring trade-off in time-based and digital conservation between functionality and integrity, between keeping a work running and keeping it faithful to the maker's intention.

A Solution in Consultation

LI-MA's response was to propose something different: the work now loads without audio, but a small speaker icon appears in the corner of the browser window. Clicking it dismisses the icon and activates the sound. The video then loops until the visitor closes the window. The tab title was corrected to accurately reflect the work's original date. The source code was stored in GitLab; the video files were backed up in LI-MA's digital repository and on LTO-8 tape, and the work is now hosted on ArtHost. This solution was developed in consultation with Jongeleen.

What It Means to Keep a Digital Artwork Alive

Digital art does not decay slowly or predictably. It can stop working overnight, triggered by an update issued somewhere upstream. It can be a browser developer, a hosting provider, a platform changing its terms of service. Museums and collecting institutions are not always equipped to catch this, and they are rarely the first to know. The network of people around a work – artists, programmers, researchers, advisors – is often what keeps it legible.

LI-MA's role in cases like this is to offer the knowledge and the frameworks that help institutions respond to it. The conservation strategy for Running a Circle Clockwise was collaborative by design, developed alongside the artist, the museum's registrars and conservators, and the original programmer. That collaboration produced a solution that held the work's intention intact – as far as it could be held. Whether it continues to hold depends on what browsers do next.

Running a Circle Clockwise is on view as part of Pixel Pioneers at Depot, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. The LI-MA case study report, interview, and object-related documents are available on request via info@li-ma.nl.

Header: Jeroen Jongelengen, Running a Circle Clockwise (2017). In collection: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.