Selon l'histoire du salon (2004)

"Selon l'histoire du salon" is a collection of software design artifacts looking at the 18th Century French Art Salon and using the programming construct of simulation in order to showcase the rich particulars of visual production during the Enlightenment.

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Artist Statement

This was originally a Java enterprise application with a Flash front-end, attempting to allow the user to weave histories from a dataset created from my research on the 18th Century French Art Salon. I was particularly interested in how multiple histories can be made and remade from the same collection of data, quite similar to how writing of history prior to the advent of computing might entertain revisionist histories or perspectives from different historians.

A complete data model of the Salon was created in UML and specified in a DTD ontology with XML data created according to this ontology. Separate from the model, I created Flash views that dramatized interactive history creation and how the database used by the application mirrored the gridded walls of the salon viewing space in its tabular form. Ultimately, I hoped to highlight the reappearance of epistemic forms such as the table, today in software.

Although not the only goal of the project, it is not difficult to go from both the encapsulation of data in software and the jam-packing of paintings in an exhibition space, for sale, to recognizing the implicit commodification of both art and (today) online content.

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