The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has opened its first online art exhibition that allows visitors to invest in technologies of the future through a web-based simulated stock market.
The exhibit employs an online investment system called the Åzone Futures Market, where upon entering the Åzone site, visitors receive 10,000Å of the local currency, which is called cåin (Å). Then, visitors can invest in 36 different “futures,” which range from Post-Human Driving to Bloodless War.
Instead of trading money, Åzone investors trade information in the form of “hot tips” or articles that apply to a particular future. For example, an article on lasers’ regulatory impact on the future of weather control would be a “hot tip” for the Manageable Weather future. If other traders find that information valuable, users receive more currency.
The Guggenheim’s curatorial staff is continuously analyzing the market’s activity and will profile investors who make the greatest impact on the market on the Åzone Futures Market blog. Berlin artist, Daniel Keller, has already climbed in the market as a Forecaster and Activist, after he bought as many shares of an underpriced future as he could, and then created hundreds of fake accounts to buy the future.
Upon entering the online market, the platform’s landing page also provides an updated view of the overall state of the future. Today, the future is looking 171% more personal and 86% more safe than yesterday.
While the exhibit’s technology exists in a virtual installation, the online marketplace’s purpose is to reflect the effects of technology on the world. Art is a tried-and-true form of reflecting culture, and this exhibit is essentially a system that decipher’s technologies impact on society’s collective values. Based on the market outcomes in the installation, industry leaders can use the exhibit's findings to drive decisions regarding emerging technology.
Participants can access Åzone Futures Market online and engage with the accompanying Åzone Terminal at 181 Front Street in New York’s Seaport Cultural District. Åzone Terminal is a physical installation featuring interactive interpretations of the marketplace. The terminal was developed in collaboration with New York's Center for Architecture and will be open to the public until December 31, 2015. The online Åzone exhibition does not have an end date.
While museums are progressively introducing beacon technology and digital screens into their exhibitions, the Åzone Futures Market aims to be more interpretive and dynamic. The Guggenheim’s curator of architecture and digital initiatives, Troy Therrien, wants the exhibit to kickstart ways of rethinking art exhibitions all together. By allowing audiences to invest in the technology of the future, the exhibit is both interactive and serves as a cultural aggregator.
“We need new cultural forms to make sense of the radical effects of technological change on our lives today,” said Therrien in a statement. “Åzone Futures Market experiments with the architecture of exhibitions, replacing a physical building with a digital platform, allowing visitors to become users, and enabling contributors to respond to an environment that will emerge over time.”
The idea for Åzone Future Market hatched out of a retreat on the Åland Islands in Finland following the Guggenheim Helsinki Now exhibition last spring. At the retreat, Therrian brought together a group of artists, architects, technologists and writers to discuss the implications of blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin. Throughout the event, the group realized the societal impacts that this type of technology has on the world.
“While the blockchain might be paradigmatic, it is only one of many such emerging technologies—from artificial intelligence to genetic hacking—that have potential to overturn centuries-old social orders while simultaneously calling into question the very nature of what it means to be human,” said Therrian in a blogpost.
Guggenheim curators worked with Are.na, an online research platform, to create the future-oriented market. Hugo Liu, founder of the art valuation startup, ArtAdvisor, programmed the exhibit’s online engine to reflect supply and demand—the system functions like a real stock market.
When the market stabilizes, artists, architects and theorists will intervene with the platform periodically. For now, the market is unpredictable and enlightening, subject to change as fast as the future does.
