Event Title

Is It Written in the Stars? Global Finance, Precarious Destinies

Presenter Information

Brian Holmes, Paris

Start Date

17-10-2009 4:00 PM

End Date

17-10-2009 5:30 PM

Description

This paper was presented at Paper Session 3 – Digital Labour in Representation.

This paper explores an artwork - Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, by Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway - as a visual metaphor of the conditions of digital labour in the contemporary financial sphere. The experience of networked trading, the nature of the meta-commodity that is bought and sold, and the aesthetic of the ‘creative city’ that has grown up around the electronic exchanges are shown to cohere into the larger pattern of a predatory society, where ‘super-empowered individuals’ eat away the social framework that spawned their own increasingly precarious existence. Such is the destiny of the flexible personality. In conclusion, the paper inquires into the philosophical principles, scientific calculations and aesthetic figures that could chart another future.

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Oct 17th, 4:00 PM Oct 17th, 5:30 PM

Is It Written in the Stars? Global Finance, Precarious Destinies

This paper was presented at Paper Session 3 – Digital Labour in Representation.

This paper explores an artwork - Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, by Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway - as a visual metaphor of the conditions of digital labour in the contemporary financial sphere. The experience of networked trading, the nature of the meta-commodity that is bought and sold, and the aesthetic of the ‘creative city’ that has grown up around the electronic exchanges are shown to cohere into the larger pattern of a predatory society, where ‘super-empowered individuals’ eat away the social framework that spawned their own increasingly precarious existence. Such is the destiny of the flexible personality. In conclusion, the paper inquires into the philosophical principles, scientific calculations and aesthetic figures that could chart another future.