Informationlab

Richard just send me the details of the upcoming art exhibition on finance and art, titled “Derivatives, new art financial visions.” Among the many works, our Web Issue Ticker will be shown. This exhibition will be held at museum La Casa Encendida, Madrid. On the day of the opening, Fabio Cifariello will perform Nasdaq Voices, a live financial concert that involves a sound sound visualization of the Nasdaq stock market.

The exhibition will be open from June 28th to September 23d.
Curated by Mar Canet, Jesús Rodríguez and Daniel Beunza.

Update:
Mar Canet send me the url to the photos of the opening. Loved to have been there!

Hidden behind technical concepts like “Volatility”, “liquidity” or “market efficiency”, traders, brokers and analysts exercise an obscure, powerful influence over the man in the street. Contemporary art, however, has rarely explored the role played by the stock markets in today’s society. This oversight is surprising, for contemporary art encourages a critical contemplation of society and technology. Over the last decade, following the programmatic vision of Walter Benjamin, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, artists have explored new media with Net.art, climate change and the new world order created after September 11. Curiously, this has left out a central player in society and economy: the financial markets. The objective of this exhibition is to address this shortcoming with an artistic exploration and critical analysis of financial markets.

The exhibition is grouped into three conceptual blocks. The first of these, which are callled re-presentation, reaches beyond the borders of financial representation to touch non-financial subjects. The second block, which is called re-vision, proposes new artistic perspectives on markets. The last one, is called re-thinking, that brings together a variety of criticism of capital markets.

RE-PRESENTATION
The main strategy employed by art when tackling finance is de-contextualization. The first two installations in the exhibition use financial representations to explore non-financial subjects.

Despondency Index
Natalie Jeremijenko and the Bureau of Inverse Technology

Despondency Index offers a graph that combines a financial share price indicator and the levels of social despondency. The idea, produced by Natalie Jeremijenko and the Bureau of Inverse Technology, superimposes the suicide rate in San Francisco, from 1996-2000, on top of the Dow Jones index.

Web Issue Ticker
Richard Rogers and Govcom.org

Web Issue Ticker, by Richard Rogers and Govcom.org, is an interactive projection which re-uses financial ticker technology for the benefit of political activism. Instead of showing the evolution of share prices, the Issue Ticker shows the evolution of a variety of social problems.


RE-VISION
A second group of installations shows the different ways in which artists have understood the stock exchange. What do artists see when they look at the markets?

Making of Black shoals
Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway

Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway’s work Black Shoals, Stock Market Planetarium is a graphically explanatory installation. It can be viewed on a plasma screen at the head of a large conference table, reminiscent of a profit presentation at a shareholding company.

In the original piece, Autogena and Portway situated the financial universe of stock markets in the mysterious context of a planetarium.

Open Outcry
Ben Rubin

With Open Outcry, the New York artist Ben Rubin proposes a sound installation that evokes the trading floor at the New York commodities market. The work intersperses sounds of calling on the trading floor with interviews with brokers about their profession, their experience of working the market and about the September 11 tragedy.

Ecosystm
John Klima

Ecosystm, by John Klima, is a real-time representation of global currency volatility fluctuations, leading global market indexes, and up-to-the-minute weather reports from JFK airport.

Ecosystm consists of flocks of “birds” (each flock representing a country’s currency) and branching “tree” structures (each tree representing a country’s leading market index). As a market index advances, the tree grows new branches. If the index declines, branches begin to fall off the tree. Similarly, a currency’s current value against the dollar is indicated by an increase or decrease in the population of the flock.

NASDAQ Voices
Fabio Cifariello

NASDAQ Voices is an audio-visual installations based on the sonification of real time trading data over any dayof trading on the NASDAQ Stock Market. Sounds and images are automatically generated by price and volume variations of up to 90 NASDAQ stocks. Depending on the country hosting the installation, chosen companies may be related with local culture and economy.

For any of the sonified stocks, information such as company name and profile, market capitalization, and description of the associated sound is available during the performance.

RE-THINKING
Finally, a last section consisting of three works directly questioning the economic model of financial markets.

They Rule
Josh On

They Rule reveals the power network linking together the directors of America’s largest businesses and universities. This piece by Josh On displays these connections by means of relational maps.

They Rule converts information into knowledge by means of condensing graphically and interactively the enormous amount of data available in the public domain. One of the ironies of this piece is that all the information it employs is widely available and publicly accessible on the Internet. The artist exploits the rule that obliges businesses selling shares on the stock markets to disclose the makeup of the upper echelons of their management. Similarly, the boards of directors of American universities, whose main source of income is derived from private donations, are obliged to be transparent and public. The information provided by businesses and universities is freely available to all.

Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI)
Lizvix and Hans Bernhard, Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio

The Viennese group of artists Ubermorgen.com present the installation Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI). In this piece, Lizvix and Hans Bernhard take a critical approach to the information monopolies and reflect on the nature of financial bubbles. GWEI is shown to the public as a series of diagrams that reveals the radical way this piece works.

GWEI is critical of Google’s advertising based business model. Google receives more than 90 percent of its income from the adverts it adds to user searches, a product called Adesense. It also obtains income from the publicity placed by advertisers on hired pages. Advertisers hire keywords and, when these words are used in searches, their adverts are inserted, which has given rise to a word market. The art installation deconstructs this advertising mechanism.

On Translation: The Bank
Antoni Muntadas

In his piece On Translation: The Bank, the Spanish artist Antoni Muntadas explores financial currents resulting from globalization and the fragility of the value of money. The piece consists of a digital image, 76.5 centimetres wide by 101.5 high, printed on lambda cibachrome.

The piece featured at the On Translation exhibition, created by Muntadas in 2003, which revolved around the concept of translation and the exchange of global information. In The Bank, translation is interpreted as currency exchange. In other words, the artist has understood the action of changing one currency into another as a monetary translation.

Related:
The Issue Crawler Back-End Movie
Making Things Public - Atmospheres of Democracy