Consumer-graphics collection Est. 2026 · Vancouver

CLIPARCHIVE

A working museum of clip art, 1980s–early 2000s.

Now cataloguing·MS Office 97 · PCPaintbrush 1994 · Print Shop Deluxe 1995 · SoftKey Ultimate 1996·New acquisitions posted daily·All objects recovered from circulating media·The whole store is the show·

On view · Exhibit

The Bouquet

One arrangement, eleven accessions, three collections, two years apart.

A still-life bouquet of flowers in a white pitcher, composed from eleven catalogued clip-art elements against a transparent field.
The Bouquet, v2 (2026)
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

The image shows a single red rose with green leaves on it against a black background. CA-1996-mso97clipart-00663 The image shows a purple flower with yellow stamens at its center surrounded by green leaves against a black background. CA-1996-mso97clipart-00664 The image shows a digital illustration of three yellow daffodils with green stems against a black background. CA-1996-mso97clipart-00667 The image shows three red tulips with green leaves against a black background. CA-1996-mso97clipart-00668 The image shows a bouquet of colorful flowers with green stems against a black background. CA-1996-mso97clipart-00670 The image shows a stylized floral pattern with three blue flowers at its center against a dark background. CA-1996-mso97clipart-00672 The black and white illustration shows a pitcher with handles on either side of it. CA-1996-mso97clipart-01339 The image shows a pink flower with green leaves on it against a black background. CA-1996-mso97clipart-02531 The image shows a bouquet of flowers with three butterflies flying around it against a black background. CA-1996-mso97clipart-02976 The image shows a purple flower with green leaves on it against a black background. CA-1994-pcpaintbrush-1994-01683 The image shows a black background with white silhouettes of flowers featuring pink centers atop green stems that have leaves on them; there is also an arrow pointing to one flower from another direction indicating growth or development, and it appears as if two different types of plants coexist in the same space. CA-1995-print-shop-deluxe-1995-00317

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