When Microsoft's stock plummets, its star shoots across the ceiling of the Stock Market Planetarium. The installation's 2.5-meter dome, which opens at London's Tate Britain (and at www.blackshoals.net) on March 6, charts the movement of the 4,000 most actively traded companies in the global economy. Created by artist Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, the big thinker at Peter Gabriel's Real World studio, this universe is controlled by four G4s crunching a live Reuters data stream from the Nasdaq, London, and Tokyo exchanges. Market capitalization establishes the size of each of the stars, and trading volume determines their brightness. Firms in the same market sector tend to form constellations, like the petrochemical nebula and the biotech vortex. Market volatility, investor skittishness, and other random forces can break up the star systems or cause unrelated stocks to meld into new constellations. And all the while, virtual creatures feed off the energy of the stars, just as traders and investors feed off the market.
"To the man on the street, the stock exchange is an unfathomable, mysterious thing," says Portway, who hopes the project will get people thinking about the market and its global influence.
ELECTRIC WORD
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