Matthew Olivier
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Codex Algorithm · Algorithmic Essay

the msk gent essay

The MSK Gent Essay — plate
[ Institutional ]
Aug 2025
Ghent × Washington
51.0397° N · 3.7216° E
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The Commission

Major institutional collaboration with MSK Gent and the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington), as part of The Flemish Manuscript — for distribution on social feeds.

The essay explores the work of Clara Peeters for a major international exhibition — part of the exhibition’s digital programming, and a chapter of The Flemish Manuscript, commissioned by the Government of Flanders.

Clara Peeters was among the first generation of Flemish still-life painters — one of the few women working professionally in seventeenth-century Antwerp, celebrated for banquet pieces in which her own reflection appears in pewter and glass, and the first woman given a solo exhibition at the Prado. Her rediscovery is one of the great correction-stories in art history.

Each essay is an algorithmic essay — a short film and writing in the sequence that constitutes Codex Algorithm, the major conceptual artwork of Matthew Olivier. The work is made in the algorithmic feed itself — the medium the artist claims for the work — and composed for that feed: made for it, not adapted to it. All essays are written by the artist; the narrator’s voice is rendered through synthesis as a deliberate mask.

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an algorithmic essay
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