Your exam question for today:

Can Trading Market patterns be represented in a perceptually weighted experience?

That’s the question Marco Donnarumma (aka The Sad), a new media artist based in Edinburgh, has answered with his project Invisible Suns.

Invisible Suns is an autonomous system that every day analyzes the historical stock prices of a variable selection of major corporations, compresses in few minutes over 8 years of economic transactions and eventually produces a generative and self-organizing audiovisual datascape.

Donnarumma has used culled data from the real and virtual world to create a beautiful, visual interpretation of the stock market, its cyclical pattern of boom and bust as miniature suns. But don’t be fooled by their beauty, for it is akin to that acknowledged by Italian Futurist poet Marinetti, when he described the beauty in clouds of dust that blossomed from the devastation of an explosion. 

Like Marinetti’s vision of warfare, Invisible Suns is deceptively beautiful, for what is implicit is the terrible human cost of each sun’s, each market’s devastating rise and fall.

Everyday since the 1st August 2010 the system retrieves from the Internet up to date stock prices of selected companies and adds new values to its set of databases. The oldest figures date back to January 2002 while the newest are being collected today.

At the moment the system is analyzing historical stock prices of six companies which boast the highest market capital in defense and oil industry: BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron Corporation and General Dynamics Corporation.

Data are processed in real time to generate a panoramic synaesthetic scape which demonstrates an auditive and visual sensation of expansions and falls of companies shares as well as the overall movement of the trading market.

  With thanks to Mark MacLachlan