Pixel Pioneers: When a Museum Has to Rewrite Software to Show Its Own Collection
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam owns 155,000 objects. Its main building closed for renovation in 2019 and won’t reopen until 2030. The Depot, opened in 2021, is the world’s first publicly accessible art storage facility — the collection lives behind glass while the museum is dark.
Pixel Pioneers, the museum’s first exhibition devoted entirely to digital art, runs at the Depot through September 13. Curated by Amira Gad. Seven artists, two floors, work spanning 1969 to 2026.
The Artwork That Needed a Software Restoration
The piece that generated the most institutional labor was one the museum already owned. Geert Mul’s Horizons was commissioned in 2008, donated to the collection, then sat unseen for nearly two decades. It pulls 200+ paintings from the museum’s collection — all sharing a horizon line — and projects them onto a wall where visitor movement fractures and reassembles them in real time. The custom software broke. The hardware became obsolete.
The De Heus Family Restoration Fund paid for the restoration. LI-MA, a Dutch digital art preservation organization, reconstructed dependencies, analyzed the obsolete software environment, and translated the functionality into contemporary systems. Mul was involved in every decision about what defined the work’s identity: the recombination logic, the movement responsiveness, the conceptual frame. Suzanne Koopstra made a documentary following the process.
LI-MA frames the approach as “structuring change.” The museum chose to preserve behavior; the software was rewritten. When Horizons first showed in 2008, image overflow was still a cultural novelty. In 2026 the same mechanism reads as an early model of algorithmic visual behavior — the cultural reference points shifted around a work that stayed still.
From 1969 to 2026
Peter Struycken’s Computerstructuur (1969), a computer-designed enamel print of black and white pixels, opens the show chronologically. Claudia Hart’s Empire Failure, a new commission, wallpapers a room with corporate logos and charts the rise and fall of failed cryptocurrencies alongside historical empires. Suzanne Treister’s HEXEN 5.0 (2023-25) maps blockchain and AI histories as tarot cards. Feng Mengbo’s Long March: Restart replaces Mario with a Red Army soldier in a playable hacked Nintendo game.
A building designed to make storage visible. A digital artwork that needed the same conservation apparatus as an oil painting to turn on again. The Depot stores Bruegel and Rembrandt on the floors below the screens running custom code.