Looking Outwards – 06

Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, by Joshua Portway and Lise Autogena, was a project created in 2001 to represent stock market trades live. The biggest draw to this project for me was that it was two artists’ representation of the stock market, and I had just got into trading this past summer myself. On their website they describe components of the stock market as creatures that have unique “DNA” code and each traded company represents a star. The positions of these companies started out randomly positioned, but eventually drifted together over time into clusters, constellations, and nebulae. When a star is flashing it means someone just sold or bought a trade, and these trades produce food for the creatures in the “environment” the artists created. The bigger the trade, the more food is produced. The title was based on the “Black Scholes” formula which was attempting to accurately estimate the current value of a share. Two of the three mathematicians, who by the way won (all three) a Nobel Prize for this formula, went on to start a company called, “Long Term Capital Management”. Moral of this story is the company ended chaotically which almost brought the US stock market down. There are many parallels between biology, history, and the stock market that truly make this a unique and inspirational piece. I am not doing it a justice with this short blog, so I would definitely recommend checking out their website (posted below) describing the piece.

http://www.blackshoals.net/the-project-1