Kynda Atlas · the whole graph, as of October 4, 2026
Culture, seen from above.
Every Kynda map shows one artist's influences. Put all of them together and patterns show up that no single map can show: which art forms feed the others, who reaches furthest, and who links worlds that would otherwise never meet.
Currents · how influence moves between mediums
Literature is the great exporter.
Each ribbon is influence crossing from one medium into another. Books feed film, music, art and television far more than any of them feed back. Pick a medium to follow its trade.
Balance of trade
Influence a medium gives to others, minus what it takes from them. Literature and art are net exporters; music and television are the biggest importers.
Reach · how far one person travels
Range is not the same as fame.
Each petal is a medium. Its length is how many of the person's connections live there. Dolly Parton has 93 connections, most of them in music. Vivienne Westwood has half as many, spread across nine mediums, and her map has more musicians than designers.
Bridges · who connects separate circles
The graph falls into 208 circles. These people touch the most.
Left alone, the graph sorts itself into circles: jazz and the American songbook, the film auteurs, the modernist stage. Bridges are the few people with a foot in many of them. They are the best places to start a journey through Kynda.
How many of the circles (see the Circles tab) each person's direct connections reach into, and how many links run into them. The list skews toward men because a century of interviews and criticism does.
Circles · the communities the graph finds on its own
Culture sorts itself into circles.
Nobody drew these lines. Left to itself, the graph groups people who are far more connected to each other than to anyone else: jazz and the American songbook, the film auteurs, the modernist stage. Each cloud is one circle, its busiest members at the centre. The threads between circles show how much they share. Pick a bridge to see one person reach across them.
Circles are found by community detection (the Louvain method) on the core of the graph: everyone linked to at least two others. Circle names are Kynda's. Click any circle to see who is in it.
Artists' artists · influence the world hasn't caught up with
The people the greats learned from, and the rest of us forgot.
Each dot is a person in the graph. Further right, more artists draw on them. Higher up, more of the public looks them up. Usually the two rise together, along the dashed line. The gold dots sit far below it: heavily drawn on by other artists, barely known outside their circles.
Fame is a year of English Wikipedia page views (October 2025 to September 2026). "Drawn on" counts distinct artists in the graph who cite, studied with, covered or otherwise built on the person's work. "Less known than their pull predicts" compares each person with the dashed line. Seven of the fourteen highlighted artists are women, and several are Black artists the written canon under-credited. The graph found them from the connections alone.
Places · where influence starts and where it lands
Paris is the capital of influence.
Each dot is a city where artists in the graph were born, or where a band formed. Each line runs from that city to the cities of the artists who drew on its people. 147 artists born outside France draw on people born in Paris, more than any other city. London is next with 96, then New York with 80.
Influence travels further than it used to
Median distance between an artist's birthplace and the birthplaces of the people they drew on, grouped by when the artist was born, and the share of those influences that cross a national border. More influence now comes from far away, yet less of it crosses a border, as more artists draw on people from their own country.
Places come from Wikidata: where each person was born and where each group formed. Neighbourhoods and boroughs count as their city. The Countries view also counts films, albums, books and shows, placed by their country of origin, so The Godfather counts as American. Birthplace is not always where someone made their work, so a city's count reflects the people born there.
Watching it grow
From separate stars to a web.
The graph is still mostly separate stars: each map is rich at its center and thin between maps. We take the same readings every time new maps land. Here are the first two, a day apart.
Epochs · when the influences were made
Some artists learn from their own moment. Others reach back centuries.
Put every connection on a map on a timeline and each artist gets an era fingerprint. Hitchcock's influences were working the same years he started. Frida Kahlo drew on painters from four hundred years earlier.
Each bar covers the middle half of that row's years. The dot marks the median.
A first look built on five maps. Filled dots are works, placed at their release year. Open dots are people and groups, placed where their careers began. Most map entries don't have a year in Kynda yet, so these were filled in from Wikidata. Ringed dots are influences that started decades after the artist did. Those are almost always connections recorded in the wrong direction, so the timeline also catches mistakes in the graph.