Vantablack - the Closest Thing on Earth to Nothing
(excerpts from the performance text)




Vantablack

The concept of Vantablack is a stunning one.

The vertigo of Nothingness in a world so firmly built on the idea of something –something substantial, something worthwhile, something tangible, something productive– is over-powering, making us lose our sense of direction. 


Vantablack does not compromise and does not play ball

Vantablack cannot be negotiated

Vantablack does not confirm, reproduce, mirror or sustain the system

Vantablack will not respond to the cheerful call of consumerism

Vantablack will not –no matter what you do– reflect any detectable light


residing in the darkness created when physical bodies stand close to one another.

residing in the spots on the rusting billboards devoid of advertisement

residing in that area of ambiguous things and in betweens that fail to fall neatly into any category, but instead 

appears threatening and create confusion and insecurity as they shake and undermine the cultural order

or constituting the remains of that flash bid gone wrong - that extra clever high frequency trading maneuver that eventually made the transaction move too fast, imploding the system 


And this is the magic of the Vantablack

It really and truly can make things go away

I pray that as a very old woman - provided I get that far - I will turn to the underpaid nursing staff at the semi-privatized geriatric clinic, to those people who keep overusing my name in an attempt to mimic intimacy , and I will interrupt their cheerful stream of chatter with a look of Vantablack. 

Hopefully, after that, I will be left alone, excused and excluded from physiotherapy groups, crafts-classes and collaborative exercises in positive thinking. Vantablack, above all, is hope of integrity.

And I wrote a poem


Hey Vantablack

Hey, hey Vantablack

After you

There is no 

Turning back






On Economy


Ok. Let's talk about kittens.
No.
Let's talk about money instead.

Adam Smith
Milton Friedman
The Chicago Boys

So many boys

All firm believers in the theory that if you do not mess with the free market, the free market will not mess with you, that is, if you belong to those who actually have any money to speak of in the first place 

All convinced that in a free market system with minimal intervention, things will find it's own perfect balance. 

A financial (and social) eco-system of sorts. Like nature.

And today: enter the Flash Boys. 

More boys. 
Faster boys. 

High frequency trading boys.


High Frequenzy Trading is, in short, the gathering and analyzing of and reacting to large volumes of stock market information in almost no time at all, making a profit due to it's ability to act faster than any human trader could. 

All you need is a very high speed data connection and a computer.

There is a gap in time between when an investor buys a stock and when the trade is actually executed - this is where the high frequency trade takes place, buying and selling the stock again at a higher price. 

Each transaction may be so microscopic that no individual would notice or care what is going on, but over thousands or millions of trades it begins to add up. 

High frequency traders can also spot trends in the stock market in a matter of milliseconds.

And high frequenzy traders can –also in milliseconds– send out a fake bid –a flash bid– to see how much people are willing to pay for a stock, and then act according to this intelligence.

At the speed of light - almost.


Behind me are the results of half a second of worldwide high frequency trading with Johnson and Johnson stock. 

The video slows down the trades so that the human eye can comprehend what's happening. 

What you see is trading gone haywire, hopelessly beyond the control of any regulators that might want to make sure all of these trades are legitimate. 

This flood of trading confuses even other machines, creating mismatches in orders that high-speed traders can exploit.

Inside the one half-second of trading represented here, stretched out over 5 minutes in the original clip, more than 1,200 orders and 215 actual trades occur. 

The colored boxes in the video represent exchanges, and the dots that go flying represent individual orders.


Moving like nerve impulses in a body.  

Again, like Nature