What if you could see how the landscape changes as a share rises or falls? That is the idea behind an installation by British artist Anna Ridler.
For many people, the stock market seems distant from the world around us. This is partly because of the language and images we use when talking about shares. ‘When you think of a stock price going up or down, you spontaneously picture a graph in front of you with a line going up or down,’ says British artist Anna Ridler.
‘The use of such price charts was only introduced a hundred years ago, but we have become so used to thinking in that abstract image that we can’t imagine much else. While it’s just often about tangible things. Things you literally see changing in the landscape. Windmills are added, factories are built or disappear again.’
Sparked by that idea, 37-year-old Ridler has spent the past six months working on an installation that shows just that. During a boo morning from the port of Ghent to the North Sea, she took hundreds of photos of the banks of the 31-kilometre-long Ghent-Terneuzen canal. She pictured every factory, house and piece of nature she passed. ‘Even a floating hotel for asylum seekers.’
Nasdaq
That resulted in a giant photo collage of almost five metres that maps the entire economy along the canal from an unusual perspective. ‘You can’t do that with Google Street View,’ she says. ‘It was my first idea, but there are gaps, and sometimes the water can’t be seen.
Then she tagged everything that could be seen in the photos: wind turbine, power plant, construction company, chemical plant, apartment building, meadow. This gave her categories that she could link to shares in the stock market. This resulted in a moving image piece where you see the image of the banks of the canal change as stock prices move. Do energy stocks rise? Then you see more images of wind turbines and power plants. Or vice versa.
The installation, was first exhibited at Bozar as part of the Faces of Water exhibition. ‘I first wanted to work with the data from the Brussels stock exhange,’ she says. ‘But there wasn’t enough movement to make it interesting, so I used data from the US Nasdaq. Since there are quite a few big international companies along the canal, that seemed appropriate.’ To make it technically feasible, the price movements are not real-time but from a month ago.
‘But my main concern was to create a new visual language,’ she says. ‘A visual language that creates a more emotional connection. I like the challenge of telling financial stories differently from the usual way. With a Ridler terminal instead of a Bloomberg terminal, so to speak. I like that idea.’
Wikileaks romances
Ridler, who studied English literature at the University of York, is no beginner. In her work, she often uses technology – algorithms, machine learning, blockchain – to take an alternative look at how information spreads and what consequences it has. For an artwork on speculation and hypercapitalism, she built an installation in the Netherlands a few years ago in which she linked the growth of tulips – referring to the tulip mania in the 17th century – to the price of bitcoin. For another installation, she scraped – searching through digital search engines – 10,000 pages from Wikileaks documents in search of unlikely love stories.
The exhibition at Bozar shows the result of a six-month residency for the European Starts4Water programme, a European Commission initiative that brings together artists, scientists and businesses to think about how we can use water more sustainably. In the process, Ridler was selected to work around water capitalism in Flanders. She did so with the support of art college Luca School of Arts and Brussels-based platform Gluon.
‘Water is so important in everything we do,’ she says. ‘But we struggle to translate that into what value it has. That literally starts with the price you have to put on water. But it is also about what importance it has for our economy. Cities lie on major rivers, canals have been dug, factories built alongside those canals, houses put up. That water capitalism has shaped the whole landscape, led to wealth, you name it. If we understand that better, it might help us deal with it better.’
A thousand years
For Ridler, the end of the Starts4water residency does not mean the end of her project. ‘I want to go one step further,’ she says. ‘Actually, I want to create a stock market model based on historical data going back a thousand years. That is not easy. Today, we have updates on anything and everything every second. For the last 50 and 100 years, you can also easily find data. But even further back, sometimes you find only one data point per year or per season. Sometimes I really feel like a detective when I dive into the library.’
The idea is to integrate as many datasets as possible from Flanders and other European regions – ranging from the evolution of the weather, price evolutions of gold, wool and grain to astrological information. By looking for patterns in that data, she wants to train a computer model (a deep time predictive model) to make investments. ‘Stock market algorithms today work in milliseconds. Contrasting that flash trading with the idea of a model a thousand years old is exciting to me.’
For that too, she wants to use her Ridler language: working with images from the physical world instead of zeros and ones, pluses or minuses. ‘I want to visualise all the information that goes into the model. With financial models, you never get to see that otherwise, it remains hidden. But what if you make it tangible?’
