Behind the name Valise

Five years ago, while building the spreadsheet-template precursor to Valise, I asked myself, “If this was an artwork, which artwork would it be?” And then it hit me.

In the late 1930s and early ’40s, artist Marcel Duchamp was in a reflective mood and traveling often between Paris and New York City. He’d been well-known for several decades, but his interest in art had been crowded out by a fascination—or, more accurately, an obsession—with playing chess.

He decided he wanted to be the first artist to curate his own retrospective, and to do so by creating a new artwork. From 1936 to 1941 he traveled throughout France, gathering the materials to make La Boîte-en-valise, which offered a selected overview of his work as an artist in the form of miniatures stashed in a fold-out carrying case.

I saw my original spreadsheet, and now see this software platform, as a way to carry your artwork with you. (Valise is the French word for suitcase.) I hoped, when I chose the name, that it would resonate with the artists who might use Valise. Now, we hope the name communicates, with a sly smile of the kind Duchamp’s work frequently evokes, that not only do we know databases, server configuration, and good user-experience principles, but that we also know art.