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Mediaspace
For the first time Wand 5 e.V. was announcing an open competition to select the media-space 09 curatorteam. There were no limitations on the means of implementation. The purpose of this open competition was to establish a new experimental space - an >open space< in which artists can perform. (>> more) -
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AFP: Rolexes fly off the shelves as Icelanders seek safe investments
Speaking of materiality, here’s a story from AFP / Google News:
Rolexes fly off the shelves as Icelanders seek safe investments
Oct 16, 2008
REYKJAVIK (AFP) — As Icelanders suddenly find themselves in the eye of the global financial storm many are seeking stability and solace in luxury goods like Rolex watches, which unlike their plunging currency are unlikely to devalue.
As Iceland in recent weeks has teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, Frank Michelsen, the Nordic country’s only Rolex vendor, says he has seen a “significant increase” in sales.
He refuses however to reveal his figures for fear of being accused of taking advantage of the crisis.
“Customers want something they can hold in their hands,” Michelsen told AFP.
“They don’t trust figures on computers because they’ve already seen these figures vanish just like smoke,” he said.
[…]
Back to Materiality
After the Federal bailout proposal rejected on September 29, 2008, the stock market dropped big time in New York. I checked out the Map of the Market to see which sectors are down, it was full red. But there was one spot that was still green: gold (Barrick Gold ABX). This might just be a moment in the market, but it is an ironic moment where the immateriality of the markets dissolved as people lost their trust. A sign to go back to make things, sell things, and count the money by hand.
* Click on the image to enlarge.
** Cross post from my blog.
Algorithmic stock trading
Forget the movie Wall Street and its stereotypes of wonderboy stock traders. Algorithmically assisted or fully automated algo-trading is making it increasingly impossible for traders to make a killing in the market. Some analysts worry that algo-trading is making markets more volatile, others think it contributes to market liquidity and transparency. One way or the other, the trader bots are not going away…
From Wikipedia: Algorithmic trading:
In electronic financial markets, algorithmic trading or automated trading, also known as algo trading, black-box trading, or robo trading, is the use of computer programs for entering trading orders with the computer algorithm deciding on certain aspects of the order such as the timing, price, or even the final quantity of the order. It is widely used by hedge funds, pension funds, mutual funds, and other institutional traders to divide up a large trade into several smaller trades in order to manage market impact, opportunity cost, and risk.[1] It is also used by hedge funds and similar traders to make the decision to initiate orders based on information that is received electronically, before human traders are even aware of the information.
A third of all EU and US stock trades in 2006 were driven by automatic programs, or algorithms, according to Boston-based consulting firm Aite Group LLC. By 2010, that figure will reach 50 percent, according to Aite.[2]
stocks on ‘morning after’
Though I know that Burak has a smart money screenshot on his blog of the more red looking day of the recent period I thought it would be an interesting addition to show one of today’s ‘morning after’. (.. linked now ..).
The Map of the Market. (’Map of the Market’ is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg>> description)
Just one of today’s headlines:
Wall Street rally buoys Asian markets but Europe slips
cartoon promoting the stock market, 1952
My artist collegue Carlo Schiuma found this cartoon promoting the stock market as the engine of America’s prosperity.
global accident?
Just as it fits so much to today’s actuality I like to post some excerpt of Arthur and Marilouise Kroker’s City of Transformation / Paul Virilio in Obama’s America article, which I came across on networked_performance.
It also hints to the fact that politics and financial issues are knowingly that much intertwined .. so will stockmarkets rise with the win of Obama? .. if he wins. Or will subconscious fear stand in the way of a substancial change which would effect the world globally? And which signal will it send out to the world when the country that stands so generally for ‘the western mind’ can overcome such deep preconceptions?
Are we beyond Speed and Politics? What characterizes contemporary politics is the unstable mixture of speed information and slow movements. Like the slow implosion of the manufacturing economy, the slow rise of evangelical visions of catastrophe, the slow ascent — the slow ubiquity — of the speed of technology, the slow descent of culture into the cold state of surveillance under the sign of bio-governance. You can see it everywhere. In the world economy, the speed of mortgage backed securities, credit swap debt offerings, and complex derivatives always seeks to move at the speed of light. Iceland is the world’s first country actually liquidated by hyperreality with debts amassed at light-speeds now constituting 10 times its national wealth. Like Michel Serres’ the perfect parasite, the Wall Street financial elite has worked a perfect number on the host of the world economies — implanting unknown levels of toxic debt everywhere in the circulatory system of finance capital, from China and Japan to the European community. Waking up to the danger of hot debt moving at light-speed when it is definitely too late, Japanese bankers suddenly declaim that “It is beyond panic.” Wall Street types say it is “panic with a capital P.”
[…]
In 1996 Virilio may have originally predicted a “global accident” that would occur simultaneously to the world as a whole. Only twelve years later in the last autumn days of 2008 — exactly 40 years after the tumultuous political events of 1968 — is it possible that Virilio’s “global accident” has itself been accidented? Slowly, inexorably, one resistor at a time, one mobilization, one march, one individual dissent, one collective “no” at a time, with what Antonio Gramsci called the dynamism of the popular will, the global accident flips into a global political transformation. Signs of this at first political, and then technological, recircuiting of the popular will are everywhere. Entire empires have suddenly vanished, global social movements are everywhere on the rise, imperialisms have been checkmated, and the first tangible hints of a truly transformational politics is in the air.
[……] >>> read entire article
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