Commissioned by the Munch Museum, Oslo, for distribution on social feeds.
The essay is a deep exploration of Edvard Munch’s Love and Pain — the paintings known as Vampire.
Munch painted the motif repeatedly between 1893 and 1895: a red-haired woman bent over a man’s neck. He called it Love and Pain; a critic renamed it Vampire, and the name stuck — a painting permanently changed by its audience. That renaming, and what a century of viewers chose to see in it, is part of the reading.
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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