The project tries to establish a gradual journey between the extremes of design strategies: intended usability/function and sublime “dysfunction” as an aesthetic experience.
For the installation, the data acquisition modules feed from several sources of financial data (stock- and crypto-currency exchanges, aggregators, etc.) over their public Internet APIs. The installation accumulates historic and real-time trading data in the local data cache and uses provided calculations of trading trends and indexes–further calculations on the time-series data. Various time zoom scales reveal the phases of past, historic trends, that emphasize the position of current trade execution as a spatially expressive metaphor. Visualization and sonification modules utilize several specialized financial TA (Technical Analysis) programming libraries to calculate dynamically sections in the audio-visual score for the real-time 3D graphics and sonification engine. The sonic landscape consists of layers of live mixed generative sound-objects and pre-recorded various “mood themes” pre-rendered by various DAW and AI tools.
Various sound properties, such as pitch, timbre and rhythmic elements are juxtaposed in linear- and non-linear grids; ephemeral relationships are revealed and emphasized by spatially organized audiovisual cues (perspective, varying color and tone contrasts, sharpness/blur manipulation), audio-panning, and timbral modulation, allowing the viewer to distinguish easily between changing context without having to rely on visually “scanning” the chart.
In the scenes, the intention is to induce an experience of progressing complexity or visitor triggered mode-shifts that are eventually challenging to the audio-visual sensorium: the experience of the conflation within multiple reference systems plays with the visitor’s perception effort of “sense-making”.