Falcão, Ashe and Jones treat virtualisation as a way of separating the operational identity of software-based art from the ageing machine on which it originally ran. Tate’s experiments create virtual machines that encapsulate operating system and artwork software as a complete system, allowing significant properties to be compared across future technical versions. The iconic operation is functional cloning without hardware identity: a work survives by acquiring a portable computational environment that can itself be migrated again. Crucially, virtualisation is not presented as a final solution but as one step in an ongoing preservation workflow, since virtual machines also become obsolete. The paper therefore makes preservation recursive. Methodologically, conservation, collection care and information systems collaborate around test cases rather than abstract standards. The work bridges software preservation and conservation theory by showing that the relevant unit of survival may be neither file nor device but an executable configuration whose dependencies, behaviours and interfaces can be documented, encapsulated and re-instantiated.
