DOT COM
“Black Shoals” Stock Market Planetarium was originally designed to be installed in a restaurant next door to the London Stock Exchange. Our idea was that traders would be able to eat underneath the dome – that it would be a kind of ironic “Mount Olympus” from which they would be able to look down and oversee their creation during their lunch time. Of course, this was 1998, and the myth of the dot com boom was at it’s peak. Times have changed, the world has also changed – and many new layers and meanings have accreted around the project. This web site is intended to reflect this evolving nature of the project. As the Planetarium moves around the world geographically, we hope that this site will function as a constantly evolving archive of the many meanings, thoughts and translations that it gathers along the way.

The planetarium responds within a second or so to any stock trade taking place anywhere in the world, so if one of the stars flickers slightly you know that someone, somewhere has probably just spent several million pounds. Immediacy means power in the world of money, which is why the real-time information used in Black Shoals requires security clearance from the New York Stock exchange even though the information is only valuable for a few seconds. After a minute or two it's worthless. The dome attempts to recall the feeling of the panopticon, that all this information and power gathered from around the world has been focussed in the room. We’re interested in the double effect this has – the feeling of power accompanied by the vertiginous feeling of powerlessness when confronted by such overwhelming amounts of information. We wanted to explore the aesthetics of information - this feeling of the sublime that accompanies such visualisations of huge quantities of information (from medieval maps of the world to representations of the human genome) - where that beauty comes from and why people desire it.

BLACK AND SCHOLES
The title of “Black Shoals” (a “Shoal” is a large group of fish swimming together) refers to the “Black Scholes” formula, a mathematical formula invented in the seventies by three young mathematicians (Fisher Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton) that won them the Nobel Prize for economics. The formula attempts to accurately estimate the current value of a share option, and thereby reduce the risk of investing. Based on the formula Myron Scholes and Robert Merton set up a company called "Long Term Capital Management" which was spectacularly successful. It collapsed equally spectacularly in 1998, and with more than a trillion dollars invested, it nearly brought the US markets down with it. There are many theories about the cause of the crash, but the main reason seems to be that their formula had no self-reflexiveness - they didn't take into account their own impact on the market. For instance, because they were so successful, other investors would copy what they were investing in, which led to a kind of "feedback effect" often seen in biological systems. This kind of effect is often the precursor to chaos in complexity theory, and the company had to ride closer and closer to this edge of chaotic collapse. In the end they lost a billion dollars in two days, when everything finally did collapse. We saw this story as a kind of Icarus parable for those attempting to control complex systems.

The year of the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, 1998, was also the year when we first started to develop the Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium. When we started we understood almost nothing about the world of the stock market. Watching the news we would hear that the FTSE100 had slipped today, and we knew that meant bad things would happen in the future, but the connections were invisible and mysterious, like the forces the ancient Babylonians thought were exerted on our lives by the stars of the zodiac. These were the times of the dot.com boom and the height of media interest in all things stock market related – a time where the market was often equated to a kind of ecosystem with a life of its own, and where the internal dynamics of the markets appeared to be more important than its’ ties to the real world. “New Economics” was predicated on this idea that somehow the concept of money and the system of the market had finally transcended its’ origins in the flesh and blood world of human labour. So, Black Shoals was designed as a kind of parody of the trading desk of the übermensch - the Mount Olympus from which they would survey their creation.

Because the stock market has the kind of cybernetic properties of biological systems and other complex phenomena (feedback loops etc.), it can be studied in the same was as biological systems. This tends to give rise to a sense that the market is somehow a "natural" expression of some fundamental forces. One of the lessons we learned in our long journey to understand something about the operations of big finance is that the market is only a natural expression of the particular artificial world model that it embodies - in the same way that the artificial life creatures in Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium are natural expressions of the computer program that they exist in.