Xiaoying Meng-Looking Outwards 06

(Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium)

Black Shoals is an art project by Joshua Portway and Lise Autogena. The project displays the activities of the stock market as a planetarium. The project uses randomness in a very interesting way. In the beginning, the stars representing each company are randomly distributed. As time passes, the stars start to drift and clog together, moving into constellations. Without the random placement of the stars at the beginning, the relationship and attraction between each star cannot be shown in this way. I admire this project because it turns numeric data of the stock exchange into visually pleasing graphics that can be better understood. I guess the algorithm for this project could be inputting real-time data into graphics and use randomized locations for the beginning.