Join Serpentine Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist, physicist and Director of BarabásiLab Albert-Lászlo Barabási, ideas collective CAMP, and artist Burak Arikan as they discuss how network effects and big data are poised to shift our understanding of the dynamics of the contemporary art world.
Network effects pervade the art world, determining the success of individual artists, their access to exhibition opportunities. Big data and network science allow us to increasingly map out and quantify these effects, bringing out hidden connections that shape artistic careers. Meanwhile, network visualisations are themselves emerging as a new form of artistic practice. The goal of the event is to start an important conversation about the role of networks in art.
This talk follows the launch of Hidden Patterns currently on show at the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest until June 20 this year and will also open at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany, on 01 May, 2021, until 09 January 2022. The exhibition presents 25 years of research by Albert-László Barabási that uses state of the art network diagrams, visualisations and data sculptures to capture underlying structures and relationships that can help us better understand both art and society.
Join Serpentine Galleries Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist, physicist Albert-László Barabási, Artist Burak Arikan and creative collective Camp on 08 April 18:00-19:30 as they discuss network effects, the exhibition and its broader relevance across contemporary art and science.
Hidden Patterns: A Conversation About Networks and Arts is produced by Albert-László Barabási and András Szántó
Virtual Event Production by Alexandra Russell, additional production support by Alex Boyes. Special thanks to the British Council and Andrea Simon from the Ludwig Museum, Budapest.
CAMP is a collaborative studio founded in Mumbai in 2007. It has been producing fundamental new work in film and video, electronic media, and public art forms, in a practice characterised by a hand-dirtying, non-alienated relation to technology. CAMP’s projects have entered many modern social and technical assemblies: Energy, communication, transport and surveillance systems, ports, ships, archives – things much larger than itself. These are shown as unstable, leaky, and contestable “technology”, in the ultimate sense of not having a fixed-function or destiny, making them both a medium and stage for artistic activity.
Burak Arikan is a New York and Istanbul based artist who works with complex networks. He investigates societal issues and develops his findings into abstract machinery, which generates network maps and algorithmic interfaces, results in performances, and procreates predictions to render inherent power relationships visible and discussable. Arikan’s software, prints, installations, and performances have been featured in numerous exhibitions internationally. Arikan is also the founder of Graph Commons, a collaborative platform for mapping, analyzing, and publishing data-networks.
Albert-László Barabási is a cross-disciplinary researcher and founder of BarabásiLab who originally studied sculpture, before changing to the study of physics at the universities of Bucharest and Budapest. He gained his PhD from Boston University and is responsible for developing the theory of complex networks. He runs the BarabasiLab at Northeastern University in the U.S.A. and holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and at the Central European University in Budapest. He lives and works in Boston and Budapest.
