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The Black Shoals Stock Planetarium uses real-time financial data to create an artificial skyscape. Stars represent listed companies, which flicker each time their stock is traded and move in the artificial universe in response to their relations to other companies.
Originally designed by Joshua Portway and Lise Autogena to appear as an installation piece next to the London Stock Exchange in the late 1990s, the project depicts economic activity through a mixture of astronomy, astrology, and biology, portraying groups of related companies as a new zodiac and the lives of individual stocks as part of a complex ecological system:
Within this environment, a complex ecology of glowing amoeba-like “artificial life” creatures emerge. The creatures live in a world composed entirely of money and they feed on trading activity. Whenever a stock is traded its’ equivalent star produces food for the creatures – the bigger the trade, the more food is produced. . . .
Because the stock market has the kind of cybernetic properties of biological systems and other complex phenomena (feedback loops etc.), it can be studied in the same was as biological systems. This tends to give rise to a sense that the market is somehow a “natural” expression of some fundamental forces.
. Historian Shae Davidson's research interests include public policy and the relationship between culture and civil society. His publications range from articles on industrial history to absurdist poetry.
The Black Shoals Stock Planetarium uses real-time financial data to create an artificial skyscape. Stars represent listed companies, which flicker each time their stock is traded and move in the artificial universe in response to their relations to other companies.