Value Quest Bourse

Well thought out and executed. One of the themes that has emerged this year in the competition is the use of game structures, both as a kind of metaphor (like Monopoly) and as (to a lesser extent) an actual well thought out series of user interactions through time.

This does a great job of thinking through user experience in a broad sense- not just how to make the interaction design "functional."

It pushes user experience further by getting a user to actually participate in a series of scenarios in the gaming.

The game metaphor of the roulette wheel is something that someone has to actually "play through" rather than just being a kind of visual parody.

I tend to think that the usage of humor/gaming softens the blow of a powerful message. Think of Slavoj Žižek’s lectures. A progressive force is sitting in the audience, which is rolling with laughter while hearing about a lot of issues that are not supposed to be taken lightly. OK, bitter medicine is easier to swallow with a bit of sugar. I find it important to discover that perfect ratio of irony/humor and the heavy stuff.

Urtica is known for its amazingly elaborate work and masterful usage of media. And the deployment of humor seems to be carefully measured. Games (gaming) are also very well known fortheir educational angle. To quote Isaac de Pinto: “Commerce is a game, and nothing can be won from the beggars. If one wins everything from everybody all the time, it would be necessary to give back the greater part of the profit voluntarily, in order to begin the game again.”

Although Urtica’s work (including this one) is set in the art world which is very well defined as another commodity machine (“The value of an asset, e.g., a capital asset or an artwork, depends on psychological trust in authority that stands behind it and the expectation of future profits flows.”), it doesn’t fail to provoke, entertain and yes, teach.

They summed it up pretty well themselves: “The Value Quest Bourse points up: How you invest, where you invest, makes how the world will look like.” It’s not about negating the system, it’s about turning the system on itself or at least using it for the common good.

A very detailed and complex body of work that looks like it is part of a longer term project that has been worked on for some time with the gallery. This gives it a strong background and depth that i found very engaging, more and more information to read, listen to and understand.

Without seeing it in situ, which i think is important to this piece of work, it is all presented in a clear manner, with the combination of info graphics, video and actually getting prizes balancing well. It did make me want to know more and try harder to understand the concept, although i did get lost in some of the longer text!

The real effect of this work seems to be in the actual lived-experience of the installation/happening of the installation/exhibit. The web presence serves as a thorough documentation of the programme of the critique, but lacks the emotive impact of the participatory event. That said, what is here online is incredibly well thought out and detailed, and accomplishes much of the intents of the authors. The linkage of financial action (fictional or not) to immediate consequences is an urgently necessary characteristic in the game-play - it almost makes the site less allegorical and more direct, subversive and speculative in its own right.

Part of the stress of actual financial responsibility as outlined by recent works such as "The Hour Between Dog and Wolf" is in fact hardwired-biology; neuroscience. We act in response to stress in ways that are not entirely psychological, but rather quite physical. The web-presence misses this real physical stress which the live-event may have indeed encouraged for didactic ends. While what exists online serves to engage the cerebral side of the entire concept it lacks the visceral message of the flesh.

All in, this is a sophisticated and prescient critique of market driven economies, and a truly engaging proposal for an effective exhibition concept.

This work was almost as opaque to me as the actual financial systems and instruments it allegorises. Which I suppose is the point.

The phrase 'casino capitalism' as an accusation/categorisation of the dominant economic system has been literalised as an online gambling den. The obfuscating jargon along with insistent market logic has been hijacked to critique its own crisis. In reality of course the metaphor is limited because although the markets are literally a gamble and confidence trick, structural privilege and disadvantage dictate who rolls the dice. The winners are the only ones playing the game and the losers are being played with. And there can be no winners without the luckless losers.

I enjoyed the project's ambition as well as the level of refined aesthetic detail. The crowded compositions mimic the data density of financial environments, evoking a pseudo-scientific authority. The iconography is fully convincing.

Some of the longer texts are nearly illegible due to the size and style of typography. Which is a shame because they are jammed with important ideas.