“Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium is an art project created by Joshua Portway and Lise Autogena.
The project takes the form of a darkened room with a domed ceiling upon which a computer display is projected, like a planetarium. Audiences are immersed in a world of real-time stock market activity, represented as the night sky, full of stars that glow as trading takes place on particular stocks.
In Black Shoals each traded company is represented by a star, flickering and glowing as shares are traded. The stars slowly drift in response to the complex currents of the market, while outlining shapes of different industries and the huge multinational conglomerates like the signs of the zodiac. The movement of the stocks is based on calculated correlations between the histories of each stock and those of its near neighbours. The stronger the correlation between the histories of the stock prices of any two companies, the more powerful the gravitational attraction between them. Although they start out randomly distributed in the planetarium, over time the stars clot together and drift into slowly changing constellations, nebulae and clusters. Through this technique different industries naturally start to emerge as galaxies. Any general disturbance in a section of the market will have a visible effect on the sky – the collapse of Enron, for instance, would have caused a sort of black hole – all the companies affected would glow very brightly due to the level of trading and would be pulled in to a single point in a very powerful vortex.”
