Opening speech — Barabási: From the Formula to the Picture, Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle Budapest)

The opening speech

Translated from the Hungarian original.

Thank you very much — I am delighted to open Albert-László Barabási’s exhibition.

To begin, please jump back 322 years with me. In 1704, Newton showed that white light, passed through a prism, splits into seven colours. That doesn’t sound revolutionary today. But back then it was. Before that, we believed white light was the pure, indivisible principle. Unity itself. And colour was some disturbance, some distortion. Newton understood: white light is composite. What appears unified has structure behind it — and that structure can be known. Many found this unsettling. But it inspired many — and it had an enormous influence on the whole Enlightenment. Let me show this through one concrete example, dear to me:

A Jesuit mathematician, Louis-Bertrand Castel, read Newton’s Opticks — and found the ideas so inspiring that he built an Ocular Harpsichord: an instrument for the eyes. Sixty panes of coloured glass, candles behind them, and when you strike a key, a colour appears. Even Telemann travelled to Paris just to see it. Voltaire and Rousseau engaged with it — wrote about it, argued about it.

That creation was not an illustration of Newton’s physics. For me it is a beautiful example of a culture understanding a principle and beginning to create from it. Making it its own — making it personal.

Let us jump to 1999. Through the last century, the accepted view worldwide was that networks organise themselves at random. In the model of two Hungarian mathematicians, Pál Erdős and Alfréd Rényi, every node has roughly the same chance of acquiring connections. No structure — only chance.

Barabási and his student Réka Albert mapped the internet of the day, and found what had been there all along — only nobody had looked for it: networks have hubs. Around a few nodes an enormous number of connections gather; around most, hardly any. The same is true of cities, of scientific citations, of the spread of fake news. One law that is present everywhere — it only had to be understood.

What in a superficial reading sounds like “everything is connected to everything” — and seeing this network behind me, perhaps some of you feel it that way — is in fact a very concrete mathematical structure. In the next room we see a reflection on the super-spreaders of Covid-era fake news: a mere 12 people were responsible for 65% of anti-vaccination disinformation. Not everything is connected to everything. If one takes the trouble to understand the structure, one understands the world far more deeply — the world of vast data and networks, which has an enormous effect on us all.

2026. Műcsarnok. I believe that understanding something is worth little if, as a culture, as a society, we cannot engage with it personally. Castel built his instrument in 1725. Barabási now paints his hidden networks.

But this exhibition is not scientific illustration. The three series — Fake News, Banned Books, Numb3rs — set out from encoded data and arrive at painterly structures. They do not explain. They make personal.

It is very beautiful how the exhibition begins from Barabási’s childhood — we see the grandfather making wallpapers with patterned paint rollers, and the motif returns in unique rollers designed for particular themes. Barabási sees the world differently through his scientific background. But as a feeling artist, he can transform this for us very personally.

And this is very relevant. We can only master our technological world, developing at tremendous speed — we can only be free rather than at its mercy — if the understanding is real, not superficial; if the experience is personal. If we create from it, and form it in our own image.

Barabási’s work — as scientist and painter at once — shows us exactly this: what we know as data, here we live as human beings.

Enjoy the exhibition!