Folio III · On View
A series of 25 algorithmic essays covering 25 works inside the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection · commissioned by a Trustee, 2026.
About the Manuscript
Twenty-five paintings from the Philadelphia Museum of Art — one painting per chapter, released on schedule.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art Manuscript is a twenty-five-chapter sequence of algorithmic essays on twenty-five paintings from the Philadelphia Museum of Art — a codex within the Codex Algorithm, made in the algorithmic feed itself — the medium Matthew Olivier claims for the work. Each chapter takes a single painting as its case study, reading it not as a relic but as a piece of working software: a designed system for managing where the eye goes, what it lingers on, and what it chooses to remember.
The manuscript was commissioned in January 2026 by Dennis Alter, Trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Twenty-five paintings, selected for the codex from across the museum's collection — three centuries of practice in a single sequence.
All twenty-five chapters are written. The manuscript begins publishing on June 2, 2026 and completes on August 14, 2026 — a ten-week release across twenty-five paintings from the museum. Each chapter releases on the published schedule; the page you are reading is the table of contents.
— Visit —
Philadelphia Museum of Art →I · Selection
Paintings enter the manuscript when they answer a question the present is asking — not in the order they were made or hung. The codex follows the argument.
II · Method
Each chapter reads composition, sightlines, narrative compression, and the management of attention — the same questions modern platforms ask, asked five centuries earlier.
III · Cadence
Twenty-five chapters across ten weeks, June through August 2026. Each releases as a short video essay with the painter's notes and footnotes. Dates are fixed; the manuscript completes August 14.
Chapter XIV · Latest Release
Mary Cassatt · 1881
Cassatt paints the promenade in the Bois de Boulogne as a study in shared direction — her sister Lydia at the reins, a young niece beside her, a groom behind facing outward. A reading of how Cassatt, working from inside Impressionism as its only American woman member, engineered a composition around modern female agency: the hands holding the reins made the compositional center of the frame.
Watch the essay →Chapters · 14 of 25 bound
All twenty-five chapters have publication dates between June 2 and August 14, 2026. Click any “Notify me” to be alerted on the day each chapter binds.
Chapter I
Winslow Homer
Watch the essay →Chapter II
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Watch the essay →Chapter III
Charles-Joseph Natoire
Watch the essay →Chapter IV
Washington Allston
Watch the essay →Chapter V
Unknown Artist
Watch the essay →Chapter VI
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Watch the essay →Chapter VII
Vincent van Gogh
Watch the essay →Chapter VIII
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Watch the essay →Chapter IX
John Singleton Copley
Watch the essay →Chapter X
Henry Ossawa Tanner
Watch the essay →Chapter XI
Paul Cézanne
Watch the essay →Chapter XII
Kay Sage Tanguy
Watch the essay →Chapter XIII
Jozef Israëls
Watch the essay →Chapter XIV
Mary Cassatt
Watch the essay →Subscribe to the Manuscript
Subscribers receive each chapter of The Philadelphia Museum of Art Manuscript as it releases over the ten weeks from June 2 to August 14, 2026 — along with chapters from the other manuscripts, codex announcements, and studio news.
Several chapters per week during release · No marketing · Unsubscribe anytime
About
Codex Algorithm is the major conceptual artwork of Matthew Olivier — visual artist and conceptual artist, with major practices in painting and writing. The work is a long-form sequence of algorithmic essays — short films and writings — that read paintings from across the historical record as early instances of the attention-engineering we now call the algorithmic feed. All essays are written by the artist; the narrator's voice is rendered through synthesis as a deliberate mask, in keeping with the work's argument that the medium is the message. The work treats the algorithmic feed itself as both venue and medium. The Philadelphia Museum of Art Manuscript is one chapter of that larger work.
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