On view · Exhibit
The Bouquet
One arrangement, eleven accessions, three collections, two years apart.
Rendered from archive objects by the compose pipeline, not a generative model: every stem's position, scale, and rotation is a hand-tuned value arrived at by render-and-measure iteration, reproduced byte-for-byte by the recipe script.
Elements: CA-1996-mso97clipart-00663, CA-1996-mso97clipart-00664, CA-1996-mso97clipart-00667, CA-1996-mso97clipart-00668, CA-1996-mso97clipart-00670, CA-1996-mso97clipart-00672, CA-1996-mso97clipart-01339, CA-1996-mso97clipart-02531, CA-1996-mso97clipart-02976, CA-1994-pcpaintbrush-1994-01683, CA-1995-print-shop-deluxe-1995-00317
A bouquet, assembled entirely from the holdings. Eleven catalogued objects — nine flower and vessel elements from the Microsoft Office 97 library, one from the 1994 PC Paintbrush disc, and one from The Print Shop Deluxe 2.0 of 1995 — arranged on the archive's own canvas into a single still life. Nothing was drawn for it. Every stem, leaf, and pitcher already existed as a permanent accession, catalogued and shelved before the composition was imagined, and each carries its number out of the piece and back into open storage unchanged.
The work is exhibited here less as decoration than as demonstration. An archive of clip art is usually read as a record — a place where circulating images are caught, described, and kept. This piece reads it the other way: as a supply. The same catalogue that documents where these elements came from is also the shelf they were taken from, and the provenance table behind the work (preserved in the compose ledger) is not a caption but a parts list. That an arrangement can span three separate commercial products issued two years apart, and be reassembled from their surviving fragments into something coherent, is the whole argument for cataloguing this material at the grain of the single object. The bouquet is what open storage is for. It is also, plainly, a bouquet.
11 objects on the wall
CA-1996-mso97clipart-00663
CA-1996-mso97clipart-00664
CA-1996-mso97clipart-00667
CA-1996-mso97clipart-00668
CA-1996-mso97clipart-00670
CA-1996-mso97clipart-00672
CA-1996-mso97clipart-01339
CA-1996-mso97clipart-02531
CA-1996-mso97clipart-02976
CA-1994-pcpaintbrush-1994-01683
CA-1995-print-shop-deluxe-1995-00317