Distributed Modernity uses PixPlot, a machine-learning–driven visualization tool developed at Yale, to explore how post-1945 visual culture takes shape when seen not as a linear narrative but as a dispersed, relational field. The project organizes large-scale image archives into dynamic spatial constellations, allowing users to encounter modernity as a distributed network of forms, styles, and affinities.
For this project, I generated two complementary PixPlot environments:
•A 2D constellation of roughly 23,000 images produced after 1945
•A 3D constellation of the same dataset
PixPlot analyzes each image with a convolutional neural network, grouping works according to formal and aesthetic similarity. The result resembles walking along a library shelf organized by visual affinity rather than taxonomy: Color Field paintings drift toward one another, photographic typologies coalesce, and unexpected neighbors emerge. This “extreme formalism” creates opportunities to surface lesser-known artists who share stylistic characteristics with canonical figures, revealing alternative pathways through modern and contemporary art.
A sidebar interface features automatically generated hotspots—clusters of related images identified through HDBSCAN (Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise). These hotspots serve as provisional orientations within the space, though they are not meant to be definitive; many additional clusters exist beyond those detected algorithmically. Users are invited to navigate intuitively, following patterns, outliers, and visual echoes across the field.
The spatial layout of the constellation is produced with UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection), a dimensionality-reduction technique that determines the relationships among images in two or three dimensions. UMAP parameters such as dimensionality, density, and neighbor sensitivity can be adjusted to reshape the structure of the visualization, offering alternate views of how modernity distributes itself across form, genre, and media.
Distributed Modernity makes visible the plural, networked nature of visual culture after 1945, offering a tool for discovering relationships that traditional art-historical categories may obscure.