Yet the work remains available today, though rescuing it from this platform was no easy task. Because the JPG format hadn't been invented yet, all the pictures were rendered as single frames of video, and the underlying code was written in the now-obscure Basic Combined Programming Language.

"This was not just a matter of copying some stuff off of disc to salvage it. This was a huge and expensive project to save this thing," he said, before noting that "the original book, which is now 900 years old, can still [be] read perfectly fine."

Brunton ran through many truly obscure technologies, such as the Dream Machines of the 1960s and 1970s, elaborate contraptions that produced rapid light flickers that people experienced through closed eyes.

The idea was that the flickers would produce images in the viewer's head. 

"Why watch reruns of 'Gilligan's Island' when you can watch the endless patterns generated out of your own visual cortex," he said. "So we have ... a piece of abstract art only meant to be seen with your eyes closed."