Matteo Pasquinelli … suggests that the form of our cities, the organization of our labor, the content of our entertainment and, I would add, the rules of our lawbooks and the teleological principles of our arts and sciences are all dependent on the greed, fear and irrational exuberance that drive the denizens of the electronic markets. - Brian Holmes

“[...] Imagine the night sky as an overarching dome, filled with thousands of shimmering points of light. Like celestial messengers they glitter and gleam as they drift across the face of the heavens. Each of these bright stars represents the stock of a publicly traded corporation. The intensity of their luminous presence varies in real time according to the frequency of trading. If one star co-varies with others – that is, if a pattern emerges between the rates at which certain stocks are bought and sold – then the flickering points of light draw slowly together, forming unstable constellations.

The illuminated dome is an artwork by Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, entitled Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium. It refers both to the financial economy and to ancient astrological techniques for the calculation of human destinies. For its London installation it was connected to a Reuters news feed (Tate Gallery, 2001); in Copenhagen it was wired directly to the local exchange (Nikolaj Art Center, 2004). At first glance it might resemble dozens of other stock-market visualizations, remarkable only for the astrological metaphor. But there is a further element to this piece, which transforms it into an existential allegory of contemporary social relations.

To create Black Shoals, the artists worked with artificial-life researcher Cefn Hoile, who developed computer algorithms for the generation of “creatures” that would feed off nutrient energies released by the traded stocks. On the basis of the programmer’s genetic codes, populations of creatures are born, grow, reproduce and die, developing unique survival strategies that cannot be predicted in advance. Like traders, they form vast alliances or operate warily on their own, display tremendous mobility or remain fixed in one position, focus solely on particular stocks or cast their nets across the entire virtual universe. And like traders, they are affected both by the fluctuations of the market in general and by the strategies of their rivals. A photo documenting the work shows a dense cloud of tiny A-life agents. The caption reads: These creatures would breed voraciously when they found food, causing huge swarms which would spread across the dome eating everything in their path and eventually dying out when nothing was left to eat.” [...]

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 way as biological systems. This tends to give rise to a sense that the market is somehow a ‘natural’ expression of some fundamental forces. One of the lessons we learned in our long journey to understand something about the operations of big finance is that the market is only a natural expression of the particular artificial world model that it embodies – in the same way that the artificial life creatures in Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium are natural expressions of the computer program that they exist in. - Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway

From Is it Written in the Stars? Global Finance, Precarious Destinies by Brian Holmes