Photo: iStock
Norbert Csizmadia
30/08/2024 06:00
The subject that drove the painter's brushstrokes 120 years ago has now become data. In the meantime, a new art movement has taken off, based on data and called dataism. For me, dataism, data-driven visualisation and art, is also a personal story, because the name was born at a lunch meeting when Albert László Barabási told me he was looking for a name. That's when I thought of dataism as a new art.
One of the greatest works of dataism was born years earlier. Albert László Barabási was asked by the creative director of Nature, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals, to design the cover of the journal's 150th anniversary issue. The special cover shows the interconnections between the 88,000 papers and articles published in Nature. Disciplines are becoming increasingly interconnected, and this, as a new fusion, is giving rise to a whole new network of pathways. If Leonardo was alive today, he would be driven by the same instincts and curiosity that led him to anatomy, which inevitably made him a data scientist. And as Barabási puts it, "in fact, the hidden architectures that shape what we see today are no longer made up of muscles and nerves, but of data and networks."
Geographical patterns of networks
We also see networks in geography. Modern life is unimaginable without networks. While the networks found in nature evolve organically and function almost imperceptibly on their own, we have to design and make the man-made networks work. The better we understand networks, the more we can create effective structures that support our goals. After all, networks are a set of nodes that are connected to each other. The nodes and the connections between them can be diverse, and networks are therefore extremely diverse. This highlights the importance of the nodes (or hubs, HUBs) and their relationships in networks. Connecting nodes in a network is connectivity. As Parag Khanna puts it, competitive connectivity is the most important geopolitical driver of our era. Connectivity has become a new world paradigm, and our existing maps can be expanded to include symbols for transmission lines, highways, rail networks, internet cables, airplane routes, symbols of global networks.
Geofusion: the age of fusion and networks - connectivity, complexity and sustainability
The networking and fusion of geographic places, or 'geofusion', is both a synthesis of geography and a new way of doing geography, using economics, economics, technology, design and visualisation simultaneously. The maps produced by geofusion create a new vision by combining a wide range of fields, making visible the interconnections and hidden patterns.
Connectivity factors and infrastructural and knowledge networks emerge, defining global nodes, or HUBs, in geographic nodes, building on geopolitical structures, defining a new way of understanding. Geofusion is thus both a geopolitics of networks and a network of geopolitics.
For my book, Geofusion: the Power of Geograhy and Mapping of the 21st Century , Albert László Barabási wrote the following reflections: "today it is networks that map the meaning of our terrains and through them we can understand the various changes. And geofusion shows us how to think about the role of distance and space, which is equally important."
The author is a geographer and chairman of the board of trustees of the Pallas Athéné Domus Meriti Foundation and the John von Neumann University Foundation