MONEY PATTERNS [INSTALLATION]

Money Patterns is an immersive multi-media installation that I am currently producing. It is designed to transform the exhibition space into a spatialized archive of money and financial history. The goal is to embody the anatomy of money and debt, combining fossilized artifacts with multi-format audio-visual content to reflect the overwhelming complexity and puzzle-like anatomy of financial systems. A never-ending non-linear maze of context, navigating the topics through three pillars: Body (Token), Ghost (Ledger), and Gravity (Interest).

Leveraging a decade of research into financial systems, in this project I visualize the evolution of money and debt and their interrelations over time and space. Ethnographic artifacts are fossilized in resin, the concept of ledgers is printed/projected on large industrial mesh, and a cinematic maze of short format videos explores the ethics and social effects of compound interest. By materializing invisible social contracts, the installation reveals money beyond its material format, and focuses on other social patterns of debt, trust, record keeping and interest. The goal is that visitors leave the exhibition with at least one aha effect, inspire them to investigate for themselves or even come back for more information at some later point.

BACKGROUND

After ten years of researching, writing and explaining the world of money & finance, speaking at conferences, interacting with numerous journalists and politicians, I have come to realize that most people struggle to understand cryptocurrencies because they don’t understand the nature of money and debt.

Financial illiteracy is a fallacy of our education systems, worldwide. Even those who have studied or worked in business, finance or economics often only have fragmented knowledge. They are very often one-trick monkeys who only understand a part of the financial system and contribute to its demise through short-sighted thinking. Despite my own academic background in business and economics, I left university without understanding what money is, the various forms it has taken across time and space, or the interrelations between money, debt and interest. What I know today is almost entirely based on personal research, and only marginally based on what I studied at university.

My own journey to understanding the different patterns of money felt like a dadaistic adventure of collecting endless pieces of a big and complex puzzle, while trying to put it together without a map. And this is outrageous to me. We cannot speak about living in a democracy when financial illiteracy is so widespread, that only a handful of financially literate people can take advantage over the rest of the population, which is the ultimate motivation for this artwork.

SPATIAL METHODOLOGY

It's a site-specific layout that caters to the upper gallery of the Ásmundarsalur, utilizing the venue’s verticality and light to construct a non-linear maze of context. The structure can be oriented along the primary longitudinal axis of the location (final length will depend on actual dimensions of the hall ).

Part 1. The Matter

At the boundaries of the installation i will explore the physical and digital representations of money and debt, from commodity money, where the material itself holds value, such as the Icelandic vaðmál (woolen cloth used as legal tender), or the bricks of tea used across Central Asia, to representative money, such as 17th-century "Stockholm Banco" notes, the gold standard, and the eventual transition to fiat currencies and—as an antithesis—the creation of cryptocurrencies.

To showcase this, analogue and digital representations of different tokens over time and space are fossilized into transparent resin. Depending on the size and shape of the location, they either hang on the walls, or hand from the celling in an elliptical shape, to demarcate the boundaries of the installation, creating a single, massive sculptural body.

Part 2. The Ghost

While common myths suggest barter predates money, many social anthropologists conclude that invisible social contracts predated physical currency. Money can be more than just an object and represent a memory of a social relationship. The history of record-keeping through various forms of ledger based systems are explored, from the Sumerian clay tablets of Mesopotamia, to the British Exchequer Tally Sticks, to double-entry bookkeeping of the Medici, or the collectively maintained computer ledgers of the cryptocurrency era.

I visualize the different forms of debt and debt cycles and how they connect money creation through various representations of ledgers through text and images that are printed/projected onto semi-transparent metal mesh screens hung from the roof, or between pillars (if available in. a location).

Part 3: The Gravity

The final part of the installation examines the temporal dimension of money: The concept of Interest has been subject to many religious and philosophical battlegrounds; Aristotle argued that money was barren and should not breed more money. I want to contrast the biological time of human labor with the exponential effects of compounding interest over time. Using the pattern of the exponential curve, I want to depict how interest acts as a mechanism for generational wealth accumulation, where the past (in the form of inherited capital) exerts a compounding gravity over the present (in the form of active labour active labor). It explores the friction between a finite world and a financial system predicated on infinite, self-replicating logic.

This topic is explored through a series of self-produced ultra-short format audio-visual films that reflect the TikTok nature of consuming content with the fragmented nature of understanding money and finance. These will be vertically installed in a "mini-maze" at the heart of the circle, featuring 6 crescents where viewers are exposed to these concepts by scrolling an iPad while listening through headphones.

MOCKUP /CONCEPT SKETCHES

The schemas below are just mockups. The space can have a different shape of properties. Since it is a site-specific layout the final layout is adapted to the exhibition space.