In a two-day workshop at Asia Art Archive‘s wonderful space in Hong Kong, participants built network maps for analyzing their archives, their institutional collaborations within the region, funding relations, as well as Hong Kong’s larger art ecosystem that they are part of. Below is selected work from the workshop with short explanations, photos, and screenshots.

To see the interactive graphs or the author profiles click on their names.

Artists Across AAA Collections

Created by Elaine Lin, Hammad Nasar, lamscape, this map shows the shared artist files contained in four collections within AAA’s archive. This was a prototype for a larger network analysis of the whole artist archive.

Asia Art Archive Shared Interests

Created by Chantal Wong, Lydia Ngai, this map shows shared interests between Asia Art Archive and other art and culture institutions / formations around the world. Obviously “archiving”, “publishing” and “exhibiting” are the most central processes, Pad.ma, Art Space Pool, and Southern Conceptualisms Network are the most similar to AAA. Peripheries are as interesting as the central actors, it tells what processes are not the focus of AAA.

Extended Collaboration Network Map of AAA

Created by Lucia, Susanna Chung, Mondodavo, this map presents the collaborations of AAA with various institutions and individuals. Gray colored nodes are programmes, purple nodes are sponsoring organizations. Blue lines represent “institutional programming”, orange lines represent “collaboration”, red represents “sponsorship”. This is a typical tree topology where when more interrelations added it will turn into a deceentralized one and will be more useful.

Online Art Market Players 2015

Created by Natasha Kaye Whiffin, this fascinating map shows how online art market platforms are similar in terms of their office locations in the world. From the maps we see the two large auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s are located in the center, obviously because they are based in the most connected art market cities London, New York, Paris, Zurich as well as Hong Kong and Dubai. Relatively new art market players such as Artsy and Paddle8 also position themselves in these highly connected cities, whereas Ocula is a distinct player in the Asia Pacific. Naturally, we see the single city players in the periphery of the map and among them Beijing, Stockholm, Los Angeles, and Seattle have more than one players, only Beijing’s players are unique in that they are not connected to the center.

Note that in the interactive map, when you click on a node you find detailed information about their founding year, founders and investors, and business models on the node information cards.

Other great moments from the workshop below. The maps above created with the Graph Commons interface, but they were started as hand drawn network sketches.