Celebrating the centennial of abstract art, Inventing Abstraction follows its invention through the network of artists who contributed to its development. Contributions noted include paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and non-narrative dance.
The exhibition takes the form of an online interactive network diagram, with each node being a contributor and each edge denoting a connection in the artist network. Clicking on a contributor node shifts the network view to show the network of just that artist, paired with panel on the side shows some basic biographical information on the artist along with some examples of their abstract work. You can then click into the work section to see each piece singularly and view its information. The interaction format of the site can basically be defined as:
Overall artist network → Individual artist network/bio → Art piece pictures and information
I like it!
I think it is very effective and engaging! The interactions really envelop you in the creation of abstract art and the overlap with art pieces and artists. It’s a logical order for interactions that is easy to compare and trace back. You can also go to the artists sections and look through the artists sorted alphabetically to get to their individual networks.
I have two bones to pick with this exhibition, the first being that they actually don’t give any information on the relationships represented by the edges. Picasso is connected to Duncan Grant and Paul Klee, among others, but it doesn’t explain why they are connected anywhere. The second issue is they either don’t have the source code or host easily available or not available anywhere at all. They just credit companies and people. I would be super interested to see what processes were used to create this exhibition, but I don’t think they provide that information
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I think your critiques are very insightful! It would be cool to know why specific relationships are connected. I feel that just seeing the connections doesn’t offer much despite knowing those two people interacted in some way. I think if more projects started posting their source code it would give researching the projects an added touch and helpful tool for anybody wanting to make a similar DHUM project.