The Trend Is Your Friend !

The Trend is your Friend!
is an artistic and experimental translation of the market as a model that increasingly interferes with our social environment. The installation takes a close look at economic trends that relate to finance, commodities, fashion, media, consumption, and many other spheres of life.

 

TIYF! is a machine that is constructed from visuals and sound, invites the visitors to participate, and is triggered by robots. The work questions the economic world and the market place—this persistent environment that surrounds us. It asks: How can we influence this environment and what is our role in the "game"?

 

The machine we created is an independent self-supporting system; human beings do not necessarily have to get involved in order to keep it running. The visitors can choose between observing and enjoying the audiovisual presentation or actually participating actively: In the latter case they—in the true sense of the word—slip into the role of traders trying to force the market movement in their favour. Thus, they participate in the formation of trends without being in the position to manipulate the system on their own.

 

The Installation

To find out and engage in this experiment, we are invited to participate: We enter the interactive installation (by sticking our heads through the architecture from below) and are immersed in a virtual world. We see digital video scenarios (270° projection) around us that constitute the assets of a market game in which we trade by ordering with our heads as joysticks. We sell or buy aesthetic and social values and we bet capital on the scenarios/assets' performances and appearances. All our trades flow into code, which is based on a market model. Our mutual activities instantly result in market prices, which translate into visual and acoustic changes of the respective scenario. What happens around us is the result of our collective, but not necessarily shared behaviours and desires. Not only do we influence, but also move markets, and thus create, inflate and deflate trends. If the majority of players get too hyped up in one direction, we see a bubble bursting.

Robot traders are the "market makers" on this artistic trading floor. They ensure activity and at the same time create a "real-world scenario:" The contingency resulting from their random behaviours prevents the market from being manipulated by potential joint actions of human traders. Inside this world, we 'invest' capital, win or lose 'money' and we see exactly how much we trade on each asset. Even when we leave this world, the game isn't over: Our successors inherit our capital. When our place is not filled, inflation slowly decreases the capital's value.

 

The Body and Mind Split

Stretched horizontally across the exhibition space, an inserted ceiling forms a second level. It resembles a stock chart unfolding into 3D space. This membrane separates the real from the virtual space of the exhibition. The lower section, "the real space", is visible from the outside: The passers-by see headless people whose body movements are due to "another" reality—the immersive virtuality of the exchange floor.

 

The visitors enter the installation by slipping underneath the architecture to find an opening in the membrane. They stick their heads through and become part of the media-architectural environment—"the virtual space". Their heads become "joysticks", and with this interface as well as their voices they communicate in the world of TIYF!

 

Anonymisation

12 players are allowed to participate at the same time. 7 are human, while the other 5 are robots. The robots' main tasks are to serve as market makers and to allow for a real world situation that can't be manipulated by human players.

 

Interaction

Each he participant/trader's head movements are tracked. A virtual insect is assigned to each participant/trader. When she looks around, the insect follows her eyes.
When the participant/trader stops moving her head and looks at the screen, the insect turns into an info display which shows the following information: name (Ms.A, Mr.B...), capital and asset shares of the user as well as the bid and ask prices for selected assets.

Asset Selection

The scenario/asset the trader looks is automatically selected.
When the trader shouts, "buy" or "sell", the selected asset and the ask or bid-offer are indicated on the info display.

 

Price Determination

The system works like an open outcry trading floor, except that the frequency of shouts decides the price—the more often the trader shouts "buy" or "sell", the higher the ask, the lower the bid, respectively.

Trend and Bubble

A trend is created when a critical mass of traders decides for trades on the same preference. The more this preference is accepted, the higher the probability that the trend formation develops into a bubble, which culminates in a burst and a subsequent market crash. When a bubble appears, the respective scenario starts to extend across the whole projection screen, shrinking the other asset worlds. The sound and visuals of the bubble overlap and dominate the whole trading floor. After the burst and crash, the scenarios again appear trisected, with the crashed asset showing a clip that corresponds to a stabilised position and market value.

The Scenarios / Assets

A 270° projection screen of 20 by 2 metres shows the virtual "trading floor". It is comprised of three different scenarios that also constitute the assets in our trading game. The scenarios are derived and created from videos, images, 3D environments, texts and sound. They constitute a set of value preferences that the visitors are invited to choose from by trading in line with their personal inclinations and motives. The audiovisual content of each scenario is composed of 25 video clips — discrete asset material. The two poles of each sequence (Clips 1+25) correspond with bursting bubbles. A bar chart at the upper corner of each projection field shows the history of trades already processed.

 

The following brief description of the clips gives the content as a whole including the poles. In reality, the visitors enter and find for each scenario a specific clip at some point of the spectrum. A successive development of the markets is just as unlikely as in a real market; the video content appears more or less volatile. Only in the case of a forming trend a clear direction is more likely to appear.