It breathes. Like lungs, it inflates and contracts. Day after day, night after night, stronger during the week, weaker on the weekend. And yet regularly, reliably, always along the jagged time line in the middle of the display. At the beginning it is February 18, 2020. There is still nothing to suggest what will happen on March 22 of this year: The total collapse of this lung – a breathing system representation of cellular communication in the heart of New York. What remains? Two tiny, thin scraps, more like narrow coastlines than the densely built-up island of Manhattan, the outlines of which they show. People actually had to experience first-hand what it means to be unable to breathe, and New York went into lockdown.
The visualization of network developments is the core area of the Hungarian-American physicist and network scientist Albert-László Barabási. But with the video and photo work “My 21st Century. Breathing New York”, he and his research laboratory succeeded in the most impressive implementation of a system that collapsed during the corona pandemic. A scientifically based, metaphorical representation, easy to understand and human touching at the same time.
Disinformation can also be seen – as a spore capsule that disseminates its contents
Barabási has been researching data nodes and networks for 25 years and depicts them in often surreally beautiful, feather-light and colorful structures and patterns. The exhibition “BarabásiLab. Hidden Patterns” at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) Karlsruhe shows numerous examples from nature and society , Language and culture, from biology, medicine, pharmacy and physics, which Barabási’s laboratory visualized in the form of large-format photographs, models, sculptures, videos and interactive installations and installed at the ZKM. The 3D animated work on “Fake News” from 2018 is also impressive. The representation looks like a filigree seed or spore capsule that extends thousands of times – always ready to spew out its epidemic disinformation material.
The video work for “My 21st Century. Breathing New York” ends on April 20th. The course up to then is short of breath, shaky, narrow-chested. The lungs, which visualize the usage capacity of the cell phone data, do not inflate even half as much as in pre-pandemic times at night. The paralysis of shock into which Manhattan had fallen on March 22, 2020 still persisted. The work is a surprisingly vivid idea of how the billions upon millions of connection data produced by our modern society show up as a whole. Almost by itself.
BarabásiLab. Hidden Patterns – Network Thinking, ZKM Karlsruhe, until April 3, 2022, https://zkm.de/de/menschliche-mobilitaet