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<p><tt>dear Anna,<br>
</tt></p>
<p><tt>can also ping towards various other projects related to
trading, financial networks and so on, <br>
some already were mentioned</tt></p>
<p><tt>the list isn't totally complete, and quite personal</tt><tt>.
divided in two categoris,<br>
</tt></p>
<p><tt>A. projects that implies a direct interaction with markets,
trading, manipulating money or architecture of finance,
simulations of algorithms or active algorithms.</tt><br>
</p>
<tt><br>
1 CATCHING A FALLING KNIFE (MICHAEL GOLDBERG, 2002)<br>
2 GWEI (UBERMORGEN, CIRIO, LUDOVICO, 2005)<br>
3 OTC (Société Réaliste, 2007)<br>
4 RATTRADERS (MICHAEL MARCOVICI, 2009)<br>
5 ADM8 (RYBN.ORG 2011)<br>
6 COMMUNICATION VÉGÉTALE (HORIA COSMIN SAMOÏLA, 2011)<br>
7 A SUPERSTITIOUS FUND (SHING TAT CHUNG, 2012)<br>
8 ADMX / THE ALGORITHMIC TRADING FREAKSHOW (RYBN.ORG 2013)<br>
9 M&A (GOLDIN+SENNEBY, 2013)<br>
10 ROBIN HOOD ASSET MANAGEMENT COOPERATIVE (AKSELI VIRTANEN
& COLLECTIVE, 2013)<br>
11 (W)ORLD CURRENCY (PAOLO CIRIO, 2014)<br>
12 EQUITY BOT (SCOTT KILDALL, 2014)<br>
13 VOLATILITY STORMS (FEMKE HERREGRAVEN, 2014)<br>
</tt><tt><tt> 14 Ami Clarke, Low Animal Spirits (2014)</tt><br>
15 ADMXI (RYBN.ORG, 2015) <br>
<br>
the latter contains trading algorithms prototypes from : Horia
Cosmin Samoila, b01, Marc Swynghedaw, Suzanne Treister, Brendan
Howell, Nicolas Montgermont, Antoine Schmitt<br>
<br>
B. Other projects, implying only data viz and/or aesthetics<br>
<br>
1 Lynn Hershmann, Synthia (2000)<br>
2 Aernout Mik, Middlemen (2001)<br>
3 Joshua Portway & Lise Autogena, BLACK SHOALS STOCK
MARKET PLANETARIUM (2004)<br>
4 Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, Monuments (2005)<br>
5 Mathieu Saladin, Stock Exchange Piece (2007)<br>
6 Michael Najjar, High Altitude (2008/2009)<br>
7 Samuel Bianchini, ALL OVER (2009)<br>
8 Genevieve Hoffman, Financial Landscapes (2012)<br>
9 Geraldine Juarez, WEALTH TRANSFER (2013)<br>
10 Fabio Lattanzi Antinori, Flashcrash Unlimited (2014)<br>
<br>
and some online references on the topic<br>
<br>
ART & ARGENT<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.multimedialab.be/doc/images/index.php?album=argent">http://www.multimedialab.be/doc/images/index.php?album=argent</a><br>
<br>
ART IN A TIME OF RECESSION<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/17248/1/hacked-burned-economic-recession-art">http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/17248/1/hacked-burned-economic-recession-art</a><br>
<br>
MON3Y AS AN 3RRROR<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.mon3y.us/">http://www.mon3y.us/</a> <br>
<br>
/<br>
<br>
quite interested in the thread for completing our own data on the
topic,<br>
<br>
x<br>
<br>
rybn<br>
</tt><br>
<p><tt><br>
</tt></p>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Le 15/09/2016 à 08:06, Nicholas Knouf a
écrit :<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:064ab5ad-a12f-279c-0230-286c0c73b872@wellesley.edu"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------</pre>
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Hi Anna and Tim, and others on the list,<br>
<br>
Thanks for mentioning MAICgregator! And thanks again Anna for
writing about it in your recent book. Indeed, MAICgregator is no
longer actively updated, not because of some of the issues that
Tim and Anna have raised, but rather for more mundane ones, namely
the difficulties of keeping net.art active. MAICgregator
functioned by screen-scraping websites (that is, using code to
"read" and collect data from other institutions' websites), and to
keep that code current would nearly be a full-time job. I kept up
with it for a number of years, but once I finished my PhD I
realized I simply did not have time to do this anymore. There is
code deep in MAICgregator that was specific to the design and
layout of tens of different websites, and keeping track of changes
in each of those websites would itself be nearly a full-time job.
There's the additional issue that browsers themselves, such as
Firefox, are developing at such a rapid pace as to make it nearly
impossible for a single developer to keep up. Further restrictions
by browser manufacturers on what extensions (like MAICgregator)
can do also makes the net.artist's life difficult. So it has to do
with obsolescence and speed rather than the challenges of working
with finance-as-topic within the art world.<br>
<br>
But there is a separate challenge for any artist---not just a
net.artist---in working with financial data, and it is something I
touch on a bit in my recent book _How Noise Matters to Finance_.
There I write about the work of the French collective rybn and
their FLASHCRASH SONIFICATION, which is one of the few pieces that
I know of that directly addresses contemporary high-frequency
trading. Their piece sonifies the activity of a number of stock
exchanges on May 6, 2010---the date of what is now called the
"flash crash"---in order to provide an affective account of that
day where the stock exchanges had tremendous swings both down
_and_ up. While the blame for these swings cannot be placed
squarely on the actions of high frequency trading programs, these
algorithms did contribute to the volatility. Nevertheless, the
piece enables one to experience the noisy activity of the markets
through sound, attuning one to the activity of the machinic.<br>
<br>
But their piece is only made possible through the free release of
a large amount of financial data from a company called Nanex, a
firm that has been highly critical of the move towards high
frequency trading. Access to financial data is big business, and
without Nanex's release of this data rybn's project would not have
been possible. Indeed, when I was looking at working with stock
market data a number of years ago, I discovered that it would be
financially infeasible. To get access to the amount of data I
would need would cost me thousands of dollars a month in access
fees, thousands of dollars a month for computing resources, and
likely thousands of dollars a month to hire a specialized
programmer. Needless to say I did not, and do not, have those
kinds of resources. Older projects, like the famous _Black Shoals
Stock Market Planetarium_, required agreements with major stock
exchanges for access to their data feeds. It's an open question as
to what sorts of things those exchanges would allow an artist to
do with their data.<br>
<br>
I speak only for myself, but the challenges in working with
financial data as an artist are thus not concerns or fear about
the subject matter itself, but rather more mundane questions of
access and resources. And I think it's in the more mundane issues
that we find the crux of the matter, and the difficulty I
personally have with making net.art (or computational art in
general) today, and that is uninteresting complexity.
Paradoxically, when we now have access to things like arduinos or
easy-to-program-in environments like Processing, I find it more
difficult to make work I find interesting, especially if it falls
outside of the confines of what these environments provide for by
default. Building a website that wants to do something other than
what WordPress or tumblr allows now requires the use of HTML
frameworks, Javascript, and a large amount of backend code.
Keeping up with all of the changes in these libraries is itself a
full-time job. (Something interesting to consider is whether or
not the proliferation of internet art on platforms like tumblr or
Instagram is due in part to the uninteresting complexity of
building websites from scratch today.) If I step away from my iOS
code for a few months I find that most of it won't compile
anymore, there are new APIs to use, and Apple has changed the
process for uploading apps to the AppStore, yet again. While it
was complex to write code a decade, two decades, three decades
ago, I feel as if surmounting that complexity through a kind of
understanding was possible. Today the parts are so integrated, so
often changing, that it takes a team of people working full-time
to understand the full stack. Perhaps that means the net.artist
needs to collaborate more, to hire people who devote their entire
time to keeping up with these changes. To me these constant
changes are uninteresting complexity. I'd rather learn and work
with other things, other complex systems, things that change at a
time scale or rhythm more suited to my body and my way of knowing
and being, instead of a temporality dictated by trends, capital,
or CPUs. I'm working out what those things and systems are, for me
personally, over the coming year.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
<br>
Nick<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 9/14/2016 11:43 PM, Anna Munster
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:47964BE6-9865-4A65-8D2F-9D4CE3B4B789@unsw.edu.au"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Yes MAICgregator is a great example of how the question of finance totally subtends all kinds of relations across the net, especially pedagogical/knowledge ones! I also think this work was way ahead of the game in that it perhaps signalled how an activism might arise around ‘outing’ all kinds of knowledge-based institutions’ ‘investments’ in dirty monies. Recently this has upscaled to demands that universities and colleges divest from dirty financial networks.
If Nick’s around I’d love to hear from him about where he’s going with the finance-knowledge-network relationship and why he deactivated MAICgregator…is finance too touchy a subject for art?
cheers
Anna
Anna Munster
Associate Professor,
Faculty of Art and Design
UNSW
P.O Box 259
Paddington
NSW 2021
Australia
<a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:a.munster@unsw.edu.au">a.munster@unsw.edu.au</a>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://sensesofperception.info">http://sensesofperception.info</a>
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On 15 Sep 2016, at 7:52 AM, Timothy Conway Murray <a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:tcm1@cornell.edu"><tcm1@cornell.edu></a> wrote:
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Thanks so much for joining us, Anna, and for focusing our attention on net.art focusing on the finances of the web. While not directly in with Heath Bunting's piece, which I'm very pleased to see recalled, you have me thinking fondly of Nick Knouf's MAICgregator (<a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://maicgregator.org">http://maicgregator.org</a>) that is a Firefox extension that aggregated information about the embeddedness of colleges and universities (I seem to recall that he focused on US institutions) in the military-academic-industrial contex. The software provided an overlay on university homepages of the data culled from government funding databases and news sources, etc., as well as information about university trustees.
I recall Nick's being aggressed quite harshly by one of my colleagues for the "terrorism" of his project (whose aim was to reveal the disguistes of terrorism of a different sort). I'm hoping that Nick will see this post and perhaps comment in more detail on this fascinating and innovative piece (which seems to be no longer active). I seem to recall that Anna might have written something about this piece in her last book as well?
Cheers,
Tim
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
<a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/">http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/</a>
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
<a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu">http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu</a>
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853
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<br>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Nicholas Knouf<br>
Assistant Professor, Cinema and Media Studies Program<br>
Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481<br>
Office: Clapp 306 (2016–2017 academic year) Office Phone:
781.283.2105 Fax: 781.283.3647<br>
PGP: 0xAB50A0D9<br>
<em><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/how-noise-matters-to-finance">How
Noise Matters to Finance</a></em> available now!</div>
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