Derivart

From Mediaspace

Derivart (Daniel Beunza, Mar Canet, Jesús Rodríguez in collaboration with Eduard Aylon)

Derivart is an interdisciplinary art group located in Barcelona. Currently, it is constituted by a plastic artist, an interactive designer and a sociologists of finance, who are Jesús Rodríguez, plastic artist, Mar Canet, is computer game engineer and designer, and Daniel Beunza is assistant professor of management at Columbia Business School, New York City.

Derivart explores the intersection of art, technology and finance. Based in Barcelona, this art collective is comprised of a digital designer (Mar Canet), a plastic artist (Jesús Rodriguez) and an economic sociologist (Daniel Beunza). Its projects include the curatorship of art exhibitions, production of art and the analysis of the capital markets.

The Derivart group presents at mediaspace_09 for the first time the new development of a refined touch-table interface, which developed from their intense research in the field of media oriented representations of financial visualization. An earlier 2004 version of the 'SpreadPlayer' had already provided an audio based real-time transmission of the stock market data through sound.

The new SpreadPlayer version is a digital instrument made from a touch-table with a radar interface. Users can listen to data from stock prices in real time by dragging the logos of listed companies from the Spanish market into the radar area. This project by Derivart emerged from the goal of generating financial visualizations from an artistic standpoint, making use of new technologies and creating a tool that can help integrate visually impaired people in stock markets.

SpreadPlayer reviews the concept of financial visualization through sound. The installation proposes the notion of “audible representation” and applies it to the context of finance, pinging on the usual Wall Street practice of making a multi-task use of the senses in the trading floor. It is well known, for example, that brokers use their sight to follow the market they are trading, and keep themselves connected to the rest of the market by overhearing conversations. By privileging sound in the individual market experience, SpreadPlayer redefines the traditional concept of financial visualization.