Drawing the Social: Jacob Levy Moreno, Sociometry, and the Rise of Network Diagrammatics. In: Working Paper Series Media of Cooperation, 2 (2017). (original) (raw)
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Social network analysis offers a broad range of formal and interpretative methodologies to deal with social structures, not only by discursive, but also by visual means. Sociograms, depicting social relations as nodes and lines, have played an important part in the reification of social structures since the beginnings of sociometry. This paper brings together two strands of analysis: first, a historical perspective on the development of social network visualization; and, second, exemplary stories of black-boxed technologies that inform not only the depiction, but also the interpretation of social networks. The article aims to reflect upon scientific construction of social structures as knowledge that is appropriated by society not least owing to its easy handling as tool and interface. Drawing social networks is regarded as social technology and therefore as an application within the realms of social engineering.
Art’s Networks_A New Communal Model
Every artistic approach throughout history has formed its own language and reshaped the object of art. As for contemporary art, it was technology that determined its orientation: the computer, intermediary spaces, mass communication tools and the Internet have become the new media for many artists working today. It is clear that the digital perspective presents new and powerful sources Essay
With the revision of canonical accounts of art history and the rise of digital humanities over the past two decades, networks have emerged as useful tools for visualizing the redistribution of dominant art historical narratives. Networks, however, represent nodes and edges, at times obscuring the social realities in between, and art historical scholarship on them has been critiqued for its lack of attention to art objects themselves. This session therefore asks: How can the concepts of network science be applied to art historical research? What new questions might be drawn from an exploration of social networks of the past? And how might artistic production itself be an instrumental component of, or even a vehicle for, networked action? We aim to consider the ways and means that network science might be used as a methodological tool of inquiry within the discipline of art history, and as a space to consider how networks have been understood historically both by artists and art historians. This session calls for short paper presentations, to be followed by a productive discussion/debate amongst presenters and attendees about the ramifications of social network science within art historical discourse. All disciplines, periods, and perspectives are encouraged to submit proposals. Session Chairs: Miriam Kienle, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Claire Kovacs, Canisius College; Lauren Applebaum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
All that is Social Melts into the Network
In D. T. FERRANDO, B. LOOTSMA, K. TRAKULYINGCHAROEN (ed.), Italian Collage, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2020, 2020
In the “complex and variegated panorama” of Italian architects now recurring to drawing as a critical practice, as well as to blogs and social media as vehicles for the communication of their work, the cases of Beniamino Servino (1960), Carmelo Baglivo (1964) and Luca Galofaro (1965) stand out for their representativeness: not just for the contents of their researches, which move in several directions reaching different levels of complexity, but also for the form they take and the dynamics they generate, once they are distilled into digital collages and posted online. It is important to stress the relevance that the choice of the medium has for the comprehension of the work of these (and other) authors. In a way that’s not so dissimilar from the magazine Archigram, in fact, they recur to web tools as editorial platforms of which they are at the same contributors, editors and publishers. In this sense, they are fully responsible for what and how is being published, extending the scope of their investigation way beyond the simple production of images. It is for this reason that, in order to briefly introduce the drawings of these three authors, I find it necessary to consider them from the point of view of both their messages and their media.
This article examines a number of prominent network analysis projects in the field of art history and explores the unique promises and problems that this increasingly significant mode of analysis presents to the discipline. By bringing together projects that conceptualize art historical networks in different ways, it demonstrates how established theories and methods of art history—such as feminist and postcolonial theory—may be productively used in conjunction with quantitative/computational approaches to art historical analysis. It argues that quantitative analysis of art and its networks can expand the qualitative approaches that have traditionally defined the field, particularly if theorizing is not positioned as something to be overcome by quantifiable data, but rather regarded as a fundamental means of understanding how data is structured, examined, and visualized. Although network analysis has a great potential to reveal the significance of actors marginalized by canonical narratives of art history and track unforeseen transnational and intercommunal histories of artistic exchange, it may also paradoxically silence social hierarchies and mechanisms of marginalization, as well as historical disruptions to them, if the principles underlying the data are not interrogated from the outset. Ultimately, the article proposes much can be gained when art historians work with and through digital technologies, using critical visual analysis to examine the epistemologies which structure the network visualizations that they produce.
Visualising invisible networks as collaborative arts practice
International Symposium of Electronic Art
This paper examines approaches to the visualisation of ‘invisible’ communications networks. It situates network visualisation as a critical design exercise, and explores how community artists might use such a practice to develop telematic art projects – works that use communications networks as their medium. The paper’s hypotheses are grounded in the Australian community media arts field, but could be applied to other collaborative contexts.
Subjects, networks, assemblages: A materialist approach to the production of social space
Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks, 2011
What is the territory of a human being? Where are the borders of the society or culture to which a given person belongs? If a society is a collective composed of subjects who share social, political, and economic relations, what are the boundaries around those relations? What is the radius of a citizen's public sphere, and where do its edges bump up against other spheres of discourse and governance? At the outset of the twenty-first century, in the context of transnational migration and travel, neoimperial military and economic interdependencies, and planetwide technical networks of entertainment and surveillance, the notion of a discrete, coherent social space-''a society,'' ''a culture''-has become deeply problematic. The precise logics and ultimate consequences of globalization may remain unclear. However, it is quite apparent that the ontological assumptions, theoretical frameworks, and methodological tools inherited from modern social theories that were predicated on the notion of a society are inadequate for conceptualizing the current state of affairs. Modern social theory took shape as national economies, governments , communication infrastructures, and cultures became more cohesive and reified; consequently, the mark of the nation is deeply inscribed on nineteenth and twentieth-century thought. If the nation has been an imagined community not only for the masses (Anderson, 1991) but also for theorists-a container of thought not only for popular belief but also for theory-how do we now reconceptualize and investigate the new, more rhizomatic, contours of social space? In the context of mobility and translocal connectivity, our aim must be to discover the contours of social space without presuming to know them in advance-to follow the flows that reveal the connections and relationships that are salient for a given subject. In this chapter, we develop a conceptual model of social space grounded in a materialist understanding of communication. We begin with the basic Marxist premise articulated by Henri Lefebvre (1974, 1991): that the pro- duction of space is the production of the social relations of production. Because the social relations of production (and reproduction) are often translocal and transnational, we draw on network theory to develop a con- ceptual framework for the analysis of social space as non-Euclidean (Appadurai, 1990) and rhizomatic (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). In our view, the social space of a given subject is simultaneously expressed in and constituted by three kinds of interrelated networks: social networks, or net- works of social relations, including relations of production and consump- tion (Adams, 2005; Lefebvre, 1991; Marx, 1972 [1849], 1904) and relations of family and friends (Hannerz, 1996; Morley, 2000; Rouse, 1995; Wellman, 2001), geographical networks, or networks of mobility and emplacement (Carrasco et al., 2008; Clifford, 1989, 1992; Larsen et al., 2006; Marcus, 1995; Massey, 1993; Sinclair and Cunningham, 2000), and technical networks, or networks of mediated communication (Castells, 1996, 2009; Fuller, 2005; Hansen, 2006; Morley and Robins, 1995; Sinclair and Cunningham, 2000). We understand a given subject’s practices or activ- ities as an actualization of all three of these networks. Finally, we bring in the concept of agencement (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) or assemblage (DeLanda, 2006; Marcus and Saka, 2006; Wise, 2005) to describe the con- sistency and effectivity of the molar arrangements that govern certain por- tions of a subject’s networks and activities. In closing, we offer some brief reflections on the methodological implications of defining social space in this way.