SPACE OF FLOWS: FRAMING AN UNSEEN REALITY (Documentation)
August 21, 2018 § Leave a comment
‘Featuring an international slate of artists, the festival focuses on the ceaseless flow of people, information, and substances, through expanding urban areas, the virtual realm of cyberspace, and endangered natural landscapes. In the face of worldwide streams of refugees and migrants, an overload of manipulable digital information, and injurious amounts of harmful particles suspended in the atmosphere and discharged into waterways, those in power look the other way. And all the while they withdraw and intensify control to protect what they have. Short-term success is favoured over having a sustained vision of the future’ Iris Sikking, Curator Krakow Photomonth 2018
Extracts from THE MARKET (2010-) /RYNEK (2010-)(installation at the Szara Kamienica Gallery)
Installation comprised Photographs, Powerpoint Presentation, Transcripts of Verbal Testimony, A4 Colour Photograph/Text Pamphlet, Film & 3D Data Visualisation.Algorithm & Soundscape composition Ken Curran / Data Visualisation Damien Byrne.
The project was installed alongside excellent projects by Susan Schuppli, Axel Braun & Eline Benjaminsen.
As part of the official programme, a panel titled, Data & Power took place on Saturday, May 26th at Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art. Participants were Iris Sikking, Dominik Skokowski, Eline Benjaminsen, Mark Curran, Esther Hovers, Clément Lambelet, Rune Peitersen, Salvatore Vitale and was moderated by Alicja Peszkowska. To a full house the event went overtime due to audience responses and discussion. It was documented and available below.
‘A more perfect reminder of exactly how on-time and urgent these artists and their projects are, considering our connected world, even the very ground we walk upon. These stories remain resident in my consciousness and now alert me at odd moments to pay attention, to observe my own special omens’ From review by Christiane Monarchi on Photomonitor.co.uk available here.
Thank you to Iris Sikking for her generous invitation and to Aga Dwernicka, Joanna Gorlach, Karolina Leśniak, Marcin & Małgo and team in Krakow for all their hard work.
THE MARKET has been curated by Helen Carey (Director, Firestation Artists’ Studios) and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, NEPN (University of Sunderland, UK), Noorderlicht (Netherlands), Institute of Art, Design & Technology (IADT), Gallery of Photography (Dublin), Belfast Exposed & Culture Ireland.
The Economy of Appearances @ LCGA (Installation)
October 1, 2015 § Leave a comment
In this major exhibition, The Economy of Appearances, Curran draws these projects together for the first time, expanding the enquiry with newly commissioned work completed in Amsterdam. Incorporating photographs, film, sound, artifactual material and testimony, themes include algorithmic machinery of financial markets, as innovator of this technology, absorption of crises as normalisation of deviance, and long range mapping and consequences of financial activity distanced from citizens and everyday life.
Curran filmed in the new financial district of Zuidas on the southern periphery of the Dutch capital – a global centre for algorithmic trading. Adapted from a text by former trader and now financial activist, Brett Scott, which examines High Frequency Trading (HFT) and how the input of human values, are excluded, the voiceover and title of the film are inspired by Scott’s essay, Algorithmic Surrealism. The film suggests the hegemony of HFT and the extinction of human reason or intelligence – human strengths that also include traits such as empathy and ethical behaviour – in Market decisions will both perpetuate and render more extreme the power relations of minority wealth in globalised capitalist systems
Through the application of an algorithm identifying the words “market” and/or “markets” in public speeches by relevant national Ministers of Finance, the data is then transformed to create the installation soundscape. To date, algorithmic translations of Michael Noonan (Ireland), George Osborne (United Kingdom), Pierre Moscovici (France) and Jeroen Dijsselbloem (Netherlands & Eurozone Group President) have been included in exhibitions in those countries. Curran activates the popular graphic representation of such circumstance through a 3D visualisation/virtualisation of the algorithmically-generated soundscape—The Economy Of Appearances—to represent contemporary financial capital functioning through the conduit of the financialised nation state.
Financial Surrealism (WTC)
Zuidas Financial District, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2015
(A4 double-sided colour print)
(text on reverse)
…in the case of the Netherlands, most of the Dutch shadow banking sector…is set-up by corporations for tax purposes, to attract external funding and to facilitate intragroup transactions…the focus of the shadow banking entities located in Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands is the euro area, or even global.
While the relative importance of the euro area shadow banking sector has risen significantly since 2007, it remains smaller than the regulated banking system. Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Ireland are the exception: the shadow banking sector assets in these three countries are substantially larger than those of the regulated banking system, accounting for almost two-thirds of the entire euro area shadow banking system. Credit through non-bank channels can have important advantages and contributes to the financing of the real economy, but can also become a source of systemic risk…
(source Banking Structures Report (2008-2013), European Central Bank, October 2014)
Shadow Banking
Many financial institutions that act like banks are not supervised like banks. The term, shadow bank was coined by U.S. economist Paul McCulley in 2007…because they are not subject to traditional bank regulation…they are in the shadows.
They are characterized by lack of disclosure and information about the value of their assets…opaque governance and ownership structures between banks and shadow banks; little regulatory or supervisory oversight…
Shadows can be frightening because they obscure the shapes and sizes of objects within them. The same is true for shadow banks. Estimating the size of the shadow banking system is particularly difficult because many of its entities do not report to government regulators. The shadow banking system appears to be largest in the United States, but nonbank credit intermediation is present in other countries—and growing. The shadow banking system’s share of total global financial intermediation was about 25 percent in 2009.
(source Finance & Development, International Monetary Fund, June 2013 Vol. 50 No.2)
Text Helen Carey
Algorithm & Sound Composition: Ken Curran
3D Data Visualisation: Damien Byrne
Film Editor: Lidia Rossner
Film script adapted by Mark Curran from original essay by Brett Scott
Voice: Claudia Schäfer
Thanks to Arts Council Ireland, Noorderlicht Photography, NEPN (University of Sunderland), Institute of Art, Design & Technology (IADT), Belfast Exposed Photography Gallery, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Gallery of Photography & Culture Ireland
Mark Curran The Economy of Appearances
4 September–30 October 2015
Opening: Thursday, 3 September
Limerick City Gallery of Art
Carnegie Building
Pery Square
Limerick
Ireland
gallery.limerick.ie
Full information here.
The Breathing Factory at FORMAT 2013, Derby, UK
March 5, 2013 § Leave a comment
I mean we can keep throwing tax breaks at them but that’s just…that will only go so far…it’s a fool’s economy or a false economy or fool’s paradise or whatever you want to call it…I think we need to be…more cost effective and I don’t think…at the moment we really are…what we have got is, as I said, is…a well-trained, educated, kind of workforce…so that’s in our favour, but, again time will tell whether that’s enough…I don’t see it attracting everybody…I think they’ll always come in for the tax break and that’s probably the main reason they’re here for now…so I’m really not sure where this is going to be in 10-15 years time…you could have a lot of well-educated people walking done to the dole office (unemployment office) and you know…but like, I don’t really know where it’s going…you know…
(Cleanroom Supervisor, Canteen, Hewlett-Packard Ireland, 28 November 2003)
THE BREATHING FACTORY
A project by Mark Curran
Update: short video clip of the installation at FORMAT 13
Installation of The Breathing Factory, FORMAT13, Derby, UK from Mark Curran on Vimeo.