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. On December 30, 1894, architect Arthur Page Brown — designer of the Ferry Building and a leading figure in San Francisco's pre-1906 architectural culture — contributed "Architecture of California" to the San Francisco Chronicle. Surveying a city dominated by wooden commercial structures and speculative haste, Brown made an arresting case: that San Francisco's impermanent building stock should be swept away and replaced with masonry construction, monumental public buildings, and a coherent civic plan.
Most strikingly, he suggested that only "a sweeping fire, accompanied by earthquake" might clear the way. Twelve years later, on April 18, 1906, it did.
Presented here on the anniversary of that catastrophe, Brown's essay offers insight into the civic imagination that preceded it — and into the architectural ambitions that would shape the city's rebuilding.
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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 near Menlo Park — on land that would become part of the Stanford University campus — Eadweard Muybridge set twelve cameras along a track and photographed the racing mare Sallie Gardner at a full gallop. The images made rapid motion legible. What the naked eye could not parse — the exact positions of a horse's legs at forty feet per second — the camera rendered available for examination.
This exhibit presents two primary sources from the event. The cabinet card, produced by Muybridge for sale at Morse's Gallery in San Francisco, compresses the experiment into a single object: sequential photographs, a diagram of foot movements, and a price list. The second source is a detailed account published six days later in the Pacific Rural Press, describing the apparatus — cameras, wires, electrical triggers — with the specificity of an engineering report. Together, the card and the article reconstruct the event from opposite directions: one visual and commercial, the other verbal and technical.
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.