thinking out loud
when I first started this art meet finance project, the scene was quite different.
six years ago, if I knew of about 5 artists who were doing similar things, it was alright.
nowadays my current, ongoing list of interesting projects on these topics is about... 80 entries long?
and I doubt I know all of them of course!
sometimes their projects are more political, sometimes more personal than the one I have been working on.
I've always thought of my project as being inspired by two different approaches: the first one is exhausting the topic of finance; the other is réappropriation/détournement.
I was not the one who figured out my project was trying to exhaust this topic - it was brought up by a mentor during a portfolio feedback session at Ada-X.
The thing that makes want to move to the third iteration of this project is the realization that even if you study finance, you cannot really make it your own. Even if you own the building.
An example of something you can make your own would be, let's say, a copy of an open source, libre software - I guess?
so this part of my démarche artistique is fruitless, if I might say.
but I still consider it important to get a better understanding of what markets are and what exchanging things means? this is a major feature of most societies, and I feel that even if we have whole departments devoted to the study of markets, we still don't quite understand them?
but what do this have to do with art?
I think that art is all about what we can experience as humans beings - so basically everything can be understood as art?
things we can see and touch and feel of course, but also things we can make and understand and explore and think and...
for me art doesn't have to be personal nor political to be art - what distinguishes it from other knowledge productions process and methods is the fact that art is inherently subjective.
when I started the ARTificial project, I wanted to use artistic methods to gain a better understanding of machine learning algorithms - more on this in this essay.
so let this v3 project, the third iteration of finartcialist, be about designing participatory works whose goal is to help us gain insights on how exchange works.
at some point I will write more about this - it is still difficult for me to gather my thoughts on my arts practice. slowly but surely. stay tuned.