Commissioned by Palazzo Maffei, Verona, for distribution on social feeds.
The essay connects the lineage between Hokusai’s The Great Wave and Umberto Boccioni’s painting of Venice’s Grand Canal — how great art and ideas have circumnavigated the world, over and over.
Hokusai’s wave was printed in Edo-period Japan around 1831 and crossed the ocean to reshape European art; Boccioni belongs to the generation that absorbed it, painting Venice as Futurism gathered. Palazzo Maffei’s Veronese collection sets centuries of art in conversation under one roof — the frame the essay borrows.
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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