Drawing Thousands of Relations Together

What (still) is the shape of art?

”What is the shape of art?” This was a central question to the abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky in his book on creativity, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, from the early twentieth century. For him, the shape is a pyramid: different disciplines and generations all working towards one shared point: Fine Art. During my time in Paris, I wondered if there were other ways to get a sense of what the cumulative and visual form Fine Art could take. I left Paris with a hunch. There are growing databases of art and artists which are categorized and organized. Diving into these databases could yield some interesting results; at least continue the conversation started by Kandinsky.

The continuation of this conversation is starting to crystalize for me. Recently, I developed a way to visualize relationships for a client. Today, I am happy to publicly release and share that way with you. It comes in the form of a JavaScript library and the technique used is a common one called force directed graphs. What is unique about my implementation is that all the physics calculations (what makes the image animate) are computed on the graphics card. This small but significant directive makes it possible to look at thousands of relations at the same time and at runtime. The animated gif above is a screen recording of this library. It takes the force directed graph and applies it to Artsy’s database. Here each colored dot in the center represents a labeled artist: Kusama, Kandinsky, Magritte, etc.. The bloom of white dots surrounding them are the top 100 related contemporaries to that artist according to Artsy.

It will take more time to complete, but the progress is compelling. The button above goes to the library running with fake data, but it gives you a sense of what you can control, the behavior of the graph, the variety of visuals it can create, and the responsiveness of the library. There are also a couple of other examples I made.

If you try it out, I would love to hear your feedback.

—Jono