Cultural Research in the Age of Machine Intelligence
On View
Introduction
What Cheer House is a San Francisco–rooted cultural studio working across archival research, artistic practice, and computational inquiry.
The public program is underway. New works in archive, research, and art will continue to appear.
Selected Works
The following works inaugurate the public program.
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Arthur Page Brown — “Architecture of California” (1894)
Arthur Page Brown and H. S. Crocker & Co., California State Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Ill., 1893. Courtesy of California State Library. In December 1894, architect Arthur Page Brown published a fierce critique of San Francisco in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. Best known today for the Ferry Building, Brown saw in the city’s wooden streetscape not charm but failure: weak construction, poor planning, and a squandered waterfront. He argued instead for a grander civic vision built in masonry and shaped by permanence.
The essay endures not only for its architectural ambition, but for its unsettling conclusion. Brown suggested that only a “sweeping fire, accompanied by earthquake” could clear the ground for a greater city to rise. Published here on the anniversary of April 18, 1906, this exhibit revisits his text as both manifesto and prophecy.
"A sweeping fire, accompanied by earthquake, would accomplish great good... Phœnix-like there would, perhaps, arise a city that would eclipse any American seaport."
— Arthur Page Brown, Architecture of California, San Francisco Chronicle, 1894. -
Muybridge, Sallie Gardner, and the Making of Motion Legible
“Sallie Gardner,” owned by Leland Stanford; running at a 1.40 gait over the Palo Alto track, 19th June, 1878. Diagram of Foot Movements. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. On a Saturday in June 1878, at Leland Stanford’s stock farm in Menlo Park, Eadweard Muybridge achieved what many considered a technical impossibility: he made rapid motion legible. Using a line of cameras triggered by the horse’s own movement, he captured the mare Sallie Gardner at full gallop and transformed a fleeting event into analyzable evidence. This exhibit returns to that breakthrough through two rare primary sources: a commercial “cabinet card” produced for sale and a Pacific Rural Press account published just six days after the experiment.
What emerged at Palo Alto was more than a famous sequence of photographs. It was a new visual system in which shutters, wires, batteries, and the moving animal itself worked together to produce knowledge. Long before cinema, and long before contemporary machine vision, Muybridge’s apparatus turned motion into data—making the horse’s stride available to the camera, the scientist, and the public eye in an entirely new way.
"The sound of the slides closing was like a continuous roll... taking a series of 12 pictures in less than half a second while the horse was traveling 40 feet per second."
About What Cheer House
What Cheer House takes its name from San Francisco’s original What Cheer House, a Gold Rush–era institution associated with public inquiry, exchange, and curiosity. That legacy is carried forward through archival investigation, computational methods, and exhibition design. Historical documents, maps, datasets, photographs, and other visual artifacts become the basis for research, publications, and original works that bring cultural history into contemporary view. Founded by artist Nina Fabunmi and cultural technologist Matt Savage, What Cheer House brings artistic practice and computational research into sustained dialogue.