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

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online curator discussion

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

Exclusive art booms despite finance crisis

hopefully or just a fairy story? watch >>

some texts I came across

ROBERT WADE / FINANCIAL REGIME CHANGE?
As stock markets plunge and governments scramble to bail out the finance sector, Robert Wade argues that we are exiting the neoliberal paradigm that has held sway since the 1980s. Causes and repercussions of the crisis, and errors of the model that brought it to fruition. >> read on

ROBIN BLACKBURN / THE SUBPRIME CRISIS
As reverberations from the stricken mortgage market reach the real economy, Robin Blackburn reveals the origins of the crunch in the shadowy realms of financialization. Precedents from the bubbles and crash of the 1920s, warnings from pioneers and venture capitalists, and proposals for how to turn the crisis to socially redistributive effect. >> read on

further by Wade: The financial crisis: burst bubble, frayed model

installation

hi, Chris, yesterday I was looking to your project idea worldtrade ! There are many interesting and important thoughts and I like the possible interactivity with the visitors. I only was thinking of that the interpretation of the worldtradecenter catastrophe as the main subject gets too much weight in a discussion about the actual world wide finance crisis and what are the currently consequences. Could you imagine to include more ideas in your installation in addition to?

analyses I could work with

Wow, Steffi, your posting from 10/27 gives links to impressive analyses:

- two long comments about the crisis in german language - interviews with Robert Kurz and Erwin Wagenhofer.

- a trailer about Wagenhofer´s right-in-time-coming movie “let´s make money”. This movie, growing since three years, will give us “problems” to say things closer, more emotinal, in our way, in Media Space installations to the same theme.

Until this moment I wanted to invite members of Attac for an evening of discussion in Media Space Stuttgart… but I feel inspired after reading Robert Kurz, to sit on these already given correct analyses, and to try the artistical crazyness of giving - don´t laugh - ideas of solution.

From me there will come three ideas… but I must imagine a government beyond actual governments, watching three focusses - the impossibility of long-time credit akkumulation, the climax of richess if you have your first two million dollars, and - this is no actual, but for me an important focus - the growth of money and time consuming adminstrations in large social structures.

actual links to finance-crash

Telepolis: Interview (german) with crisis-theoreticer Robert Kurz:, part 1,2:
part 1
part 2

Interview (german) with Erwin Wagenhofer, filmmaker: “Let’s make money” starts October 31st
Interview “Tagesschau”

Media-Space blogstart

At the End of October 2008 the Media-Space which is part of the Stuttgarter Filmwinter, an internationally renowned Film festival that features short film, experimental film and new media, is starting now an online curator discussion to establish a new experimental space and built up the program fort the show in January.

To start the blog I want to cite some examples that were already posted in our mailing list and formed a first concept:

„…we look at the current global economic crisis. It propagates stock market by stock market and effects our lives deeply. How do artists react to such man-made global crises?…“

„… Since days I have the same mad pic in my mind: There is still a world trade center. And a third plane crushes in. It´s based on the way economy was flying the last twenty years. …“

„… as it means definitly a certain end to the most recent form of neo-liberalism - how will it effect us - will it open up again a wider door for non-commercial, or just not strictly commercial art forms .. will it allow to bring in a more substantial discourse as the focus might shift to immaterial aspects of (behind) the assets and effects …“

„…language suddenly becomes ambivalent in a new way, as financial terms, nobody of us really knew some weeks ago, now becomes familiar with…“

„…this theme not only moves from local to global .. but back again …
Thus this narrow theme is very wide reaching, and eventually incorporates already the shift from local to global - to ‘lobal and glocal’ or any other hybrid form of it. …“

„…did neo-liberalism ever limit „non-commercial, or just not strictly commercial art forms“? People who act as artists in non-commercial art forms had their place in this neo liberalistic business world. We had small enemies like „being grabbed and sold“. But not the big enemies - I see them in any kind of dictatorship, and in structures with lots of administration too.
That´s why I don´t feel a change in my social position as an artist actually. But I see a chance for Media Space being actual. …“

„…there was and is a ´global lobotomy …“

„…The goverments buy bad credits with mad risks. It´s another way of handling the crisis than it was handled 1929. But uuuh, they agree in October 2008 that they don´t know what will happen in next weeks, months or years. …“

„… the reference I had in mind came more from the ‘Betriebsystem Kunst’, which just days before the crash was used so superficially again by Damien Hirst and his big sell-out … (keeping in mind that the items never might be anything worth again … and even never might be paid .. will we ever know?) …“

„… comparing this to the big sell-outs or/and deals of the banks and other risky gamblers, who are playing just with some more or less virtual ‘assets’ on the stock market .. and when it all goes wrong and the world is in crisis - which will have eventual overall effects, not just to the stock owners … they are kind of shocked that someone might be against having them receiving their ‘bonus’…“

„…’democratic control’ is a sort of nice construction…“

„…So it seems that we all converge on an interest in the suggested topics of finances and virtual labor…“

***
Wand5 and the online curator team would sincerely like to invite everyone who interested to follow our discussion up and join the Media-Space during the presentation which is in January 22nd-25th.
***

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