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  

The biggest stock market crash in history and Greece falls apart, shaking the core illusions that prop up the US and EU…. Sweet fuck what a week.

In the US we have the ultrablack humor of seeing how illusory our “system” really is; the Zeitgeisters of the world have been bonkering on for years about how the fact our system is based on greenbacks “magically” produced by the Fed makes our economy an illusion. Well, yes, but if anything, Wednesday showed how understated they were being: the entire global economy, apparently, can be brought down by somebody’s finger missing the “m” on their keyboard and hitting the “b” instead. Magic tricks indeed. Meanwhile, in the EU, the continued disintegration of Greece is calling the series of bluffs that underpin the stability of the European Union like it’s 1968 all over again but without the clothes.

It all feels like a big joke that people are tired of perpetuating. “Let’s play hypercapitalism” is getting a bit old from the looks of how people are reacting to it. It’s been old for generations but now the promised payouts seem to be hardly worth the pretense; why stay at the table when all you’re likely to win is the new Usher album and maybe, if you work really hard, a good three years at some point in your life where you can pretend you’re living the house-cars-kids American Dream before they fire you and take all their toys back and leave you with the bill?

Yes, I propose that what we’re seeing is people calling the bluff. It’s less a failure of a system that we all know was broken anyway and more a lurch towards something better, towards simpler living and a refocus on the really important parts of being alive – like building a soul instead of more mini-malls. (I may or may not have crunched the detailed astrological math on the stock market crashing in order to back up this statement. That shit’s for hippies anyway.)

So welcome again to 2010, the year of vomiting up as much as we can of the last 2000 years of this utter bullshit patriarchal woman-hating child-hating life-hating nature-hating nonsense. You’ll want an empty stomach when you’re coming up at the party anyway, so have a few glasses of water and here’s hoping you have somebody to hold your forehead while you yak.

In the meantime, watch this small masterpiece from German death diva Billie Ray Martin (via Loki23). It’ll make you feel much better.