Where: Studios One and Two Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin
When: 18:30-21:30, Thursday May 23rd 2013
Admission: Free
Speakers: RYBN
RYBN
RYBN.ORG is an extra-disciplinary artistic research platform, funded in 2000 as a web entity, disseminated into several servers all over the internet and physically present in Paris, Montréal, Berlin and Bruxelles. RYBN.ORG operates through interactive & networked installations, digital/analog visual cross-performances and pervasive computing. Their projects refer as well to the codified systems of the artistic representation (aesthetic, painting, architecture, avant-garde, music) as to the socio-politic and physical phenomenons, exploring various fields such as economics, data mass analysis, perverted artificial intelligence, disrupting auto-learning, language and syntaxes, sensory perception and cognitive systems. Their work have been shown in numerous contemporary art exhibitions and media art festivals, such as Ars Electronica, Transmediale, ISEA, Elektra, Cellsbutton, and museums and institutions like the ZKM, LABoral, le Centre Pompidou, La Gaîté Lyrique, ZKM.
RYBN will introduce the project ADM8, part of the Antidatamining series.
ADM8 – Trading Bot Performance
On august 31st, 2011, RYBN has launched a Trading Bot on the financial markets. The performance ends when the robot reaches bankruptcy. On May 6, 2010, around 2:40 p.m., the Dow Jones Industrial Average index fell about 900 points in less than twenty minutes. The loss was estimated at a trillion dollars. Following this event, all transactions made that day between 2:40 and 3 p.m. were canceled by joint agreement. This instantaneous stock market crash, which is now referred to as the “flash crash,” was caused by miscalculations carried out by high-frequency trading robots operating on the markets. Despite its virtuality, this crash sheds light upon the actual architecture of finance: its particular temporality and scale that reaches far beyond human physical abilities and perceptions, where robots trigger thousands of orders every second and flood the market with millions of pieces of fake information to hide their true investments, a process called “quote stuffing.”
Engaging finance in its most recent and complex developments, RYBN has undertaken the construction of its own trading bot, designed to invest and speculate on the financial markets. Using an online broker service to directly access the markets, this autonomous program can trigger orders as well as buy and sell stocks. Its decisions are taken with the help of an internal algorithmic intelligence system and can be influenced by a wide range of external, arbitrary parameters. The whole decision system allows the program to foresee the next moves in the markets while it tries to identify and anticipate the relevant and effective patterns within the financial chaotic oscillations. Along with its computations and performance, the robot’s activity is monitored, recorded, and visualized within dynamic mapping. A panopticon of information unfolds that is formally similar to the control rooms of the stock exchanges’ back offices. The whole program is designed and distributed in open-source format, in contrast to the black box of the algorithmic and high-frequency trading
Antidatamining is a series of visualisations of financial data. Economy is represented by its main agents –companies, groups and holdings, stock exchanges, banks and investment funds– and their interaction: capital relationships, geographic deployments, market structures. Antidatamining is a permanent monitoring device, which aims to highlight the structure of the contemporary economy, seen as a complex dynamic system.