In the aftermath of the global economic crisis of the late 2000s, the ongoing multi-sited research project THE MARKET critically addresses the functioning and conditions of global financial markets. This ethnographically informed project incorporates photographs, film, sound, artifactual material, data visualisation, and verbal testimony. Positioning finance as a pervasive force, THE MARKET’s themes range from the algorithmic machinery of financial markets to the absorption of crises as the normalization of deviance. It profiles traders, bankers, and financial analysts, and includes documentation from London, Dublin, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Addis Ababa.

Algorithmic Surrealism was filmed in Amsterdam’s Zuidas, a centre for algorithmic trading and shadow banking. The film’s narration is adapted from a text by former trader Brett Scott. Algorithmic Surrealism suggests that, with the forecasted disappearance of human traders within a decade, the hegemony of high-frequency trading will perpetuate minority wealth in the globalized capitalist system.

The financialized nation state is the conduit of contemporary financial capital. Normalisation of Deviance applies an algorithm identifying the words “market” or “markets” in speeches by national finance ministers and then transforms the resultant data to create an installation soundscape; the translation of Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Netherlands’ Minister of Finance and Eurogroup president, is presented at the Blackwood.

Algorithm and sound composition: Ken Curran