This exhibition is centred around the past twenty five years of research carried out at BarabásiLab. The lab’s team investigates those often hidden links and patterns between things and phenomena that connect nature, society, language and culture. The network approach offers a comprehensive, universal method that can be used to examine logical relations with scientific accuracy. With virtual and real data sculptures, as well as with enhanced reality technology, visualization enters the third dimension, and offers new opportunities for researchers and audiences. Employing cutting-edge technologies, the network figures and structures are engaging interpretations of the links and logical relations that lie behind the phenomena examined.
Visualization is a key phase of creating a network model. There are evident benefits to visual expression in research and the interpretation of findings: the “simultaneous view,” perspicuity, the mapping of processes and phenomena, their logical relations, the connections of the parts, can impart a knowledge that is different from that communicated by texts, the linear narrative of discursive descriptions. Compared to spoken or written language, the visual language of complex networks offers a different quality, a new descriptive-representative idiom, a novel model for the understanding of our world.
Visualization is the lingua franca between the natural sciences and other fields of culture. It is both an instrument and a method for its user, a work phase that moves the focus of network research towards more and more distant areas, making network thinking the language that discovers a new face of the world in science and everyday life.

– Készman József

I spent more than two decades unveiling the hidden patterns in the complex systems that define our biological and social existence. Yet, I was always troubled by the limitations of the abstract scientific vocabulary I had helped to develop, because it forces a reductionist framework onto complexity. It's a language designed to eliminate ambiguity and uncertainty, to discern facts instead of truth. Networks do not succumb to such simple narrates.
In the past 25 years I also walked a parallel journey aimed at bringing conflicting narratives together. As I had to see networks in order to quantify them, I have challenged myself to develop the visual vocabulary for complexity, relying on forms of expression appropriated from art. This pilgrimage resulted in works that are impossible to interpret in the scientific context. They are objects, images, videos, data sculptures and virtual experiences that demand a space of their own.
I am deeply honored that the Ludwig Museum has taken on the challenge to document the visual journey of the BarabásiLab, helping to chronicle the visual vocabulary of networks. The venue also offers an opportunity to turn the network toolset on the art world itself and arrive at a new data-driven narrative that unveils the hidden patterns that govern artistic success and the role of the supporting institutions.
The works presented in this exhibit cannot be attributed to any individual—they are the product of a deeply collaborative process involving scientists, artists, and designers who merged their creative passions in the BarabásiLab. It is their explosive collaboration that moves both science and art forward.

– Barabási Albert-Laszló