The project I chose to explore this week is the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Inventing Abstraction visualization. Abstraction, in the words of the site’s creators, was not a movement that arose from one person; it was the product of “network thinking” — ideas and theories being shared and spread between artists and intellectuals working in all sorts of mediums in places far and wide. The project aims to visualize the connections between the pioneers of Abstraction, some of which had more connections than others, but all of which contributed significantly to the development of a new modern language for the arts.
When you take a closer look at the diagram itself, its characteristics become evident rather quickly. Each of the 83 included artists represents a node on the network; a data point with connections to some portion of the other points (nodes). The nodes have two types: orange (red?) ones representing artists with more connections, and white ones representing those with fewer connections These connections between them, marking one artist’s acquaintance to another, are the edges. These nodes and edges make up the entire diagram, and the visualization becomes interactive by clicking on a node. By doing this, instead of a massive web of lines, we’re brought in tighter to a smaller network of connected artists, and a panel on the right side that lists the selected artist’s birthplace, workplace, some images of their works, interests of theirs, and for some of the more thoroughly researched artists, a blurb that summarizes their career and the connections shown on the network. While I wish there was more uniformity between the artist descriptions, I bet the MoMA wishes the same and simply could not find complete data on lots of the information they sought.
All in all, I’m not sure this is the kind of project I would need to explore any more, but I definitely recommend taking a quick dive into the world of Abstraction and checking out what else the MoMA has to offer.
