The Value We Make Together
Barcelona, Port Vell, photograph by Gordana Zikic
On networks, presence, and what grows when artists gather with intention
I want to tell you something I have been thinking about for a while — not as an announcement, but as an honest reflection from someone who has been holding this space since 2021 and watching what actually happens inside it.
VSG began during a pandemic, when studios were closed and the instinct to gather was still very much alive. What I did not fully understand then — what I think I understand better now — is that we were not just building a substitute for something that had been taken away. We were building something that did not quite exist before. A network of artists who think seriously, speak honestly, and show up for each other across time zones, disciplines, and very different stages of a practice.
What I want to share with you today is a way of seeing what we are building together — and why your presence in it matters more than you might think.
There is a principle in network theory called Metcalfe's Law. It says that the value of a network does not grow in proportion to the number of people in it — it grows in proportion to the square of that number. Ten people create a hundred possible connections. A hundred people create ten thousand. Every new person who joins does not just add one — they multiply the value for everyone already there.
I am not interested in VSG becoming large. I am interested in it becoming dense with value. And there is a difference. What Metcalfe describes is not about quantity. It is about the richness that emerges when the right people are genuinely connected — when one artist in Sweden and another in Spain and another somewhere else all find that they are working through the same questions from completely different directions. That intersection is not nothing. It is the whole point.
Every time you speak in a session, you are not just sharing your work. You are adding your node to a network that now reaches further, thinks differently, and holds more than it did before you arrived.
But there is something beyond Metcalfe's Law that I find even more true for what VSG is. It is the idea that value compounds when nodes do not just connect — they contribute. When each person who enters a network leaves something behind that enriches the whole. Not just a connection, but an idea, a question, a fragment of a process that someone else needed to hear.
This is what happens in our Sunday sessions. It is what happens when a conversation becomes a transcript, and a transcript becomes an article, and an article sits on our website and reaches an artist in a country none of us have visited, who reads it and understands something about their own practice. The intelligence of the group does not disappear when the session ends. It accumulates. It compounds. The archive we are building is not documentation — it is a growing collective mind.
There is one more principle worth naming, because it explains something about how VSG operates that might otherwise feel counterintuitive. It is called the power law. It describes how, in most networks, value is not evenly distributed. A small number of nodes generate a disproportionate amount of the energy, the referrals, the creative friction that makes everything move.
This is not a hierarchy. It is an observation about engagement. In VSG, the members who contribute most consistently — who ask the uncomfortable question, who bring the unfinished thing, who come back week after week — are doing something for the entire group that they may not even be aware of. They are raising the level. They are making it safe for others to be serious. They are holding the standard of what this space can be.
If that is you, I want you to know that we see it. And if it is not yet you — there is always a next Sunday.
Your presence multiplies. Every session you attend, every work you share, every question you ask creates connections that didn't exist before — for you and for every other member in the room.
Your contribution compounds. What you say in a session doesn't end there. It enters the archive, the articles, the memory of the group. Future members will inherit the intelligence you leave behind today.
Your engagement raises the whole. VSG is curated, not large. Which means each person here carries real weight. When you show up fully, you lift the level for everyone. That is not a metaphor — it is how networks actually work.
We built VSG to be a place where artists can think out loud — seriously, without performance, without the pressure to have it figured out. That intention only holds if we hold it together. The space is only as good as what we bring into it.
So thank you for being here. Thank you for the Sundays you showed up even when the week was hard. Thank you for the sessions where you said the true thing instead of the easy one. That is what we are made of.
We are still early. The network is still forming. The archive is still thin. But the potential energy in this group is real — and it grows every time one of us decides to take it seriously.
— Gordana Zikic, co-founder, Virtual Studio Groups