Tesserarum is an art history platform that maps the layout and interconnexions of the visual arts.
Built to organise and provide an overview of painting movements, their participants, and evolution, the atlas simplifies the experience of trawling the internet for art purposes. It began as a tool to support my own art-historical reading, a way to better visualise the vast amount of names, works, and movements that were flying around.
I suppose while we start art-history with 'isms', I was aware that the entire project of human art was, in fact, a network of interdependent facts. A tessera is the tile of a mosaic, and the name is the core visual metaphor around which the project is constructed. The database aims to organise aspects of Wikidata, as well as other open sources according to the CIDOC-CRM ontology. Making use of such a datamodel means that competing claims can exist and no evidence has to be overwritten. It allows Tesserarum to present a curated experience that can be corrected and amended without structural changes to the data and with traceability. As a student of art-history rather than an expert, I believe this allows the project to grow with my own expanding knowledge in the field rather than forcing me to act as an expert of the domain.
There are certain limitations to making use of only open data, not least the problem of copyright. I won't dwell on my views of copyright beyond the fact I find it to be a crushing force against both education and creativity. It means that certain things cannot be shown without a legal ambiguity. It furthermore limits the options for monetisation, which, while not a primary goal of the project, is a concern to any endeavour with such time-consuming potential.
Focusing, instead, on the joy such open data can bring: the entire platform has become central to how I now interact with art-history literature, and how I can continue to expose myself to more art. The experience of building on the knowledge of a giant like Wikidata (and the Getty Institute, and RKD) is daunting. How can such a small project live up to the knowledge organisation of such providers? But I believe it does. It provides a deeply visual timeline, and where better to visualise than the visual arts.
For now, beyond the copyright limitation, it covers only painting. This is naturally due to my own prejudices as user 0. This is the artform I spend my time consuming and educating myself about. Yet, others are on the roadmap! It also skews to 'canonical' artists due to their rich documentation rather than any belief of superiority. In fact, I would love to expand this much much more and rummage deep into the dataset for hidden patterns and knowledge.
I am always looking for feedback and open discussion about what would make this indispensable to others with an interest in the field. If you haven’t had a look, please do, and feel free to contact me.