A grid of abstract shapes by Wassily Kandinsky

[VDS Retro] 24 Charts Before 2024

By Mathieu Guglielmino, Dec 25 2023

This has been a rollercoaster of a year, to say the least.

I came back from Málaga, Spain, after one year abroad, and pursued my PhD thesis at ENS de Lyon, France, for a few months, until scientific disagreement with my advisors pushed me to go away from what amounted to psychological terrorism. However, I was lucky enough to attend EuroVis in Leipzig earlier this year and present some work about the visual edition of multivariate networks. This remains to this day one of my favorite memories of 2023!

In the end, I doubled my salary coming back to Paris, and I eventually could stop taking anxiety medication. It was about time I sorted the wheat from the chaff.

New job, new apartment, new friends, new partner. Then I turned thirty.

A grid of abstract shapes, the visual vocabulary of Wassily Kandisky Thirty, by Wassily Kandinsky (1937)

This time of turmoil has been intellectually stimulating. I’m a walker of many roads, and it feels like I may eventually arrive to Rome, this metaphorical Rome where science, design, and art will contribute to a better world. May I have the chance to be a part of it, with all the sound and fury necessary to break the unnecessary divisions that separate us from beauty. After all, as my (thank god ex-)advisor used to say with all the disdain he was capable of: Mathieu has the soul of an artist.

It gets easier, but you gotta do it everyday. That's the hard part. But it gets easier. (Bojack Horseman, Season 2 Ep 10)

This summer was not the first time I decided to start writing a newsletter, but it’s the first time I haven’t miss a single beat 5 months later, even after starting a time-consuming job. I knew if I wanted it to work I had to stick to a routine. Despite its initial lack of originality, tapping into the brisk tempo of news outlets proved to be a wise decision, and the habits of writing weekly allowed me to slowly drift away from commenting the work of other people and reflect on what I want my own work to be.

You might have noticed some of my thoughts are still nebulous when they reach the online public space, and that I may be writing about the same thing over and over again. I will continue doing so until I have found the exact words in the exact order to express the exact thing I’m trying to convey. Some Sundays I may go to bed at 4am and send a mail I’m most unhappy with. But I’ve never let this feeling of “my god this is crap” take over. I think I got better.

So, what’s next?

2024 is next, and I’ll be here. Will you?

VDS Retro—24 charts before 2024

This is my attempt to bring forward some interesting charts I’ve ran into from a year of war, global warming, another war, terrorist attacks, a migrant crisis, an opioid epidemics, generative AI, long Covid…