mediaspace_09
Festival for Expanded Media 22. - 25. January 2009

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online curator discussion

Kurt Tucholsky poem

There’s a poet that is accredited to Kurt Tucholsky and accurately describes the actual finance-crisis. Monika found out that this is a fake floating through the net since a while.
(see comments).

.
Wenn die Börsenkurse fallen,
regt sich Kummer fast bei allen,
aber manche blühen auf:
Ihr Rezept heißt Leerverkauf.
.
Keck verhökern diese Knaben
Dinge, die sie gar nicht haben,
treten selbst den Absturz los,
den sie brauchen - echt famos!
.
Leichter noch bei solchen Taten
tun sie sich mit Derivaten:
Wenn Papier den Wert frisiert,
wird die Wirkung potenziert.
.
Wenn in Folge Banken krachen,
haben Sparer nichts zu lachen,
und die Hypothek aufs Haus
heißt, Bewohner müssen raus.
.
Trifft’s hingegen große Banken,
kommt die ganze Welt ins Wanken -
auch die Spekulantenbrut
zittert jetzt um Hab und Gut!”
.
Soll man das System gefährden?
Da muß eingeschritten werden:
Der Gewinn, der bleibt privat,
die Verluste kauft der Staat.
.
Dazu braucht der Staat Kredite,
und das bringt erneut Profite,
hat man doch in jenem Land
die Regierung in der Hand.
.
Für die Zechen dieser Frechen
hat der Kleine Mann zu blechen
und - das ist das Feine ja -
nicht nur in Amerika!
.
Aber sollten sich die Massen
das mal nimmer bieten lassen,
ist der Ausweg längst bedacht:
Dann wird bisschen Krieg gemacht.

one month of creative work (a parody with a message)

Remember: One month ago, 7.10.2008, Frank Amos opened a „Media Space Wiki“ for us curators. Now, after four weeks of intensive dispute and creativity, the team is ready with lots of suggestions.

I like to pick out the curator´s personal inventions for Media Space:

Burak Arikan
„If my pocket were the USA“
A story of a ruinous life, with fictionary receipts and orders

State: Burak has created all fictionary documents. He is refining the story behind them. He will need four meters on a wall. The movie will last about three minutes.

Category: Objects on the wall, website, and movie

Chris Mennel
„World trade airplane“
a media triology about sudden dramatic effects in a longtime growing credit system

State: The basic pictures for all three movies are composed, but there is space for improvement. Messages for the „pin wall“ are written. The interactive part is under construction.

Category: Media Installation

Marius Watz
„Images of turbulence“
Marius has prepared one of his visualisation programs to be handeld by public. He fills in given data material or even internet streams about the world wide financial situation. Visitors create pictures on the screen and can send them via e-mail.

State: The Installation works with given material already. Marius is still searching for filters that enable the online use.

Category: Interactive Computer Presentation

Monica Nunez
„Rich ladies, poor ladies (and the female artist in the middle)“
A found footage montage of youtube videos with images of glam and ruin (yes, it has do do with actual events)

State: Monica has sampled lots of professional photos for that theme, made by female photographers. She thinks about twisting from the „youtube level“ to a pure photographic presentation. Her special idea is to use the whole bottom of Media Space for showing the pictures.

Category: Movie, and a hangout on the Wall, or - as a laminated „layout“ - on the bottom

Monika Jaeckel
„Puzzling the complexity“
A bilingual try to understand what happens in financial systems

State: Monika stopped trying to understand this f… system at all. She will prepare some material in a way that gives visitors a chance to start their own route of analysis.

Category: Presentation on six overhead projectors, on a wall and in the internet

Stefanie Reling
„World Trade Party“
a bar with rising and sinking prices for the drinks

State: Steffi has expanded her basic idea. For example there are „miracle bags“ - people can buy and don´t know what´s within them. „Derivates“ is printed on the bag´s outside. The event may need 2000 Euro of investment, but Steffi hopes to get all money back by selling the drinks and goodies.

Category: Event

Yuan Peng
„Bangin´´gainst reality“
a parade with stressed faces of important people

State: coming soon

Category: movie and website

Correct me, if I wrote anything wrong

Chris

Beautiful Inside My Bank Account Forever…

I tried to put together some articles which give an outline for the Damien Hirst auction in September, which fell together with the first days of the financial crisis. (During the weekend of September 13–14, Lehman Brothers declared bankcruptcy, auction was held on the 16th .. btw they had some early Hirsts in their collection..)

Aside from this eventually interesting fact one can definitly state, that Hirst’s idea about making ‘the art market more democratic’ eventually did not have any major effect.

“Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” his one-artist, two-day auction at Sotheby’s.
In a move that some say has the potential to change the face of art dealing, Mr. Hirst has cut out his dealers — the New York-based Gagosian Gallery and the White Cube in London — and taken his work straight to auction.

Damien Hirst’s Next Sensation: Thinking Outside the Dealer
Damien Hirst sets new auction record with ‘Investment Banker in Formaldehyde’
Damien Hirst: Beautiful Inside My Bank Account Forever…
Markets Slide, But Hirst Auction Breaks Records

Peter Aspden, an arts writer for the Financial Times, said the exhibition sales are “evidence that there are those who are insulated from the real world.” The superwealthy buyers who are attracted to a sale are not likely to be affected by the fiscal circumstances of the past few months, he said.

.. and as he needs it so desperately:
Damien Hirst X Levis Fall 2008 Spin Denim Auction

WSJ: Sign of the Times: National Debt Clock Runs Out of Digits

From the Wall Street Journal

Sign of the Times: National Debt Clock Runs Out of Digits

The national debt clock, the unofficial tracker of the federal deficit maintained by the Durst Organization in New York, has reached its limits. Last month, as the national debt exceeded $10 trillion for the first time, the clock ran out of digits to record the number.

The dollar sign in the clock had to be deleted and replaced with a one to record the massive number. The clock’s owners say a new model — with space for two extra digits — will be in place early next year.

Now the debt clock will be able to reach the quadrillions. Hopefully, that’s not a level that will be breached any time soon. –Phil Izzo

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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