{{no footnotes, date=March 2013
Black Shoals is an artificial ecosystem linked to the real time dynamics of the stock market. It was first shown at the
Tate Gallery
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...
in 2001, and nominated for an Alternative Turner Prize in 2002. A more sophisticated Black Shoals was exhibited at the Nikolaj gallery in Copenhagen in the spring of 2004.
Stars representing companies and creatures representing speculators are projected into a domed ceiling in a dark room, creating an artificial night sky which visualises the dynamics of the world stock markets.
Within this world, a creature's survival depends upon the strategies it uses to explore its world. The more a company is traded, the richer the food source for the creatures. Consequently, changes in trading patterns can be seen in the planetarium as explosions of life surrounding specific clusters of stars.
For this project Cefn Hoile designed a population of articulated creatures which reproduce and evolve both their morphology and behaviour in real time in a planetarium style display. The project was conceived by
Lise Autogena
Lise Autogena (born 1964) is a Danish artist living in the United Kingdom. At the age of 17, she left home to live in Denmark's experimental community Christiania, an experience which she has said was very important in her development.
Autogena ...
and
Joshua Portway
Joshua Portway (born 1967) is an artist and game designer. He is a frequent collaborator with Lise Autogena, for example on their Black Shoals stock market. He is also the author of thNoodle series of interactive music pieces, which was originally ...
o StainTom Riley was the lead software developer during the second showing of Black Shoals in 2004.
The name of the project is a pun on Black–Scholes, a widely used equation in financial derivatives pricing which earned two of its three inventors a
Nobel Prize in Economics
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel ( sv, Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne), is an economics award administered ...
Natural Selection
Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Charle ...
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Joshua Portway
Joshua Portway (born 1967) is an artist and game designer. He is a frequent collaborator with Lise Autogena, for example on their Black Shoals stock market. He is also the author of thNoodle series of interactive music pieces, which was originally ...
*
Lise Autogena
Lise Autogena (born 1964) is a Danish artist living in the United Kingdom. At the age of 17, she left home to live in Denmark's experimental community Christiania, an experience which she has said was very important in her development.
Autogena ...