Gallery
Twenty-one rooms, 1874 to 2026
Art and design’s loudest movements, then the machines and ideas that changed how software is made. Each room shows the work, what changed, and what a designer can borrow from it.
Why computing
In January 1839 the Académie des sciences in Paris was shown Daguerre's first pictures, and that August the process was published, free to the world. Four years later Ada Lovelace published Note G, a step-by-step method for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine that is often called the first published computer program. Photography and programming arrived within a few years of each other. This gallery follows what happened next to each.
Painters did not all panic. Paul Delaroche, the painter usually quoted as saying "from today, painting is dead," wrote in 1839 that the daguerreotype was "an immense service rendered to the arts." The famous line has never been traced to him; it first appears in print in 1874. Twenty years later Baudelaire was less generous and called photography "art's most mortal enemy." Both were partly right. The camera took over the work of likeness and record, and millions of people who would never have commissioned a painted portrait sat for one.
What painters did next is the first room of this gallery. In 1874 a group of them showed their work in a studio on the boulevard des Capucines that the photographer Nadar had recently vacated. They painted what the camera could not yet catch: light, color, movement, the feel of a moment. Over the next century painting kept moving away from the job of copying the world, and it got louder.
I write software for a living, and I think AI is to programming what photography was to painting. The part of my job that was transcription, turning a clear idea into correct syntax, is being automated. You can see it in the AI room: the same small program in five eras, and then one sentence that comes back as 135 lines. Like the painters in 1874, programmers now have to ask what only we can do. My answer, for now, is judgment: deciding what is worth building, what is true, and when it is done. The last room shows that too. The agents did the reading for this gallery. I decided what counted as fact.
Milestones
Painters who worked quickly, often outdoors, in broken strokes of pure color to catch light and passing moments of modern life.
Painters who used color straight from the tube, as loud as they could make it.
Painters who broke objects into flat, overlapping planes to show several sides at once.
Italian artists in love with speed, machines and the noise of the modern city.
Painting meant to work like music: rings and disks of pure color, and little or no subject.
Pure geometric shapes floating on white, with nothing left to describe.
Art put to work for a revolution: red wedges, photomontage and type at an angle.
Artists who answered a world war with nonsense, collage and provocation.
Straight lines, right angles and primary colors: art reduced to a system.
An art school that joined art and craft, then turned to design for industry.
Travel posters of the machine age: liners, mountains and bold lettering.
Postwar Japanese artists who painted with their feet, burst through paper and wore electric light.
Comics, ads and supermarket products, blown up and hung on museum walls.
Paintings that make your eyes do the work: stripes and patterns that seem to move.
Concert posters for San Francisco's rock ballrooms, with melting lettering and colors that vibrate.
A Milan design group that threw out good taste: squiggles, laminates and clashing color.
Computing
Computers small and cheap enough for one person to own, from hobby kits to the IBM PC.
The computer that brought windows, icons and the mouse to a mass market, with type you chose from a menu.
A proposal at CERN that became linked pages anyone could publish, addressed by URL and fetched over HTTP.
Language models trained on text and code, from GPT-2's staged release to agents that edit and test software.
A record of how this gallery was fact-checked and extended with AI agents, in October 2026.