What I am Looking At: Mark Lombardi
March 15th, 2010
Wikipedia [ Mark Lombardi ]
NPR: The ‘Conspiracy’ Art of Mark Lombardi - Late Artist’s Swirling Diagrams Chart Scandalous Relationships
I was introduced to Mark Lombardi’s work while I lived in Brooklyn in 1999. During this time I was designing content management systems and user cases for the online Medical Education market. Anyhow, the visio user case scenarios that I was designing were similar in structure to the work of Mark Lombardi and because of this I became instantly fascinated with his work. Unfortunately, he committed suicide in 2000.
Beautiful pieces. Unfortunately we now live in a world where any human connection that is not officially ordained, sanctioned and documented is considered suspect. And that’s not surprising, in that the society we live in is one increasingly dominated and dictated by a particular, corporatized, form of human connection.
And this artistic experiment could be linked to this article as a potential theorization: Y. Rumpala, “Knowledge and praxis of networks as a political project”, Twenty-First Century Society, Volume 4, Issue 3, November 2009,
(an older version is available on the author’s blog: http://yannickrumpala.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/tracing-and-reconfiguring-networks-to-build-a-political-alternative/ ).