During his MFA program, Lima worked for Siemens Corporate Research Center, the American Museum of Moving Image, and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (PIIM).

[10] In his first book Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information (2011), Lima covers the growing popularity of the network construct, not just as a scientific pursuit but as a cultural meme.

In chapter six Complex Beauty, Lima introduces a new movement or "artistic trend" characterized by the depiction of metaphorical graph structures, which he labels "Networkism".

[11][12] As Lima explains: Networkism is stimulated by rhizomatic properties like nonlinearity, multiplicity, or interconnectedness, and scientific advances in areas such as genetics, neuroscience, physics, molecular biology, computer systems, and sociology.

[14][15] His account comprises three hypotheses: Lima mentions that from an early age babies show an innate preference for curves, a human tendency corroborated by different studies, including a seminal paper published in 2006 by cognitive psychologists Moshe Bar and Maital Neta, which revealed a strong human preference for curved objects and typefaces,[16] as well as a 2013 study by researchers at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, which found a similar inclination in architectural spaces.

[17] In his second evolutionary explanation, Lima mentions the experiment conducted by psychologist John N. Bassili in 1978,[18] where the faces of participants were painted black and subsequently covered in dozens of luminescent dots.