An exploration on “Inventing Abstractions” – Week 4 Blog

For this week’s blog I decided to explore the “Inventing Abstraction” project because I thought the name sounded interesting. I did not actually realise what the project was about until after I started looking around and even then I was still slightly confused, once I clicked on the “About the Exhibition” button on the bottom of the page did I realise that the artworks that confused me were meant to be confusing for they are abstract pieces of work, meant to elicit thought and wonder.

The nodes in the exhibition are the people/artists that contributed to the creation of the abstraction painting movement in the early to mid 1900’s and the edges are the connections between those artists, essentially artists that either worked together or new each other personally. A note to make on the nodes, some artists (like Picasso for example) are outlined in red these artists are those who are connected to more than 24 connections in the networks and the ones in white are connected to less than 24, arguments can be made that in a tree arrangement the red ones would be root nodes.

The project allows us to click on the many different nodes and be moved to a different section where we see on the left side of the screen the different connections that the artist directly has with other artists through their edges, while the main artist is in the middle. On the right side of the screen, it has a very short description of the artist, detailing their name, year of birth and death and the place where they were born.
More importantly however, it also has the works of them that were featured in the in-person exhibition. When clicking on them it will move you to a section that on the left it has an image of the artwork (or a scan) and on the right it has a description of what the artwork is and how it was presented. 

I think my engagement with the artworks is good because by exploring different artists you can see their works, however the process of going back to the huge network map is not great as it takes a lot of time and thus it discourages me to keep looking at that and rather makes me want to look at the artists in the periphery of the one I’m visualising.