Event 2 : Dow Jones: A Solfège Economy

On October 31, I went to the Art|Sic Gallery in CNSI and attended the event “Dow Jones: A Solfege Economy”. When I walked into the dark room I was completely confused. There’re only three big TV screens and people in the video clips were just repeatedly singing a single tone. I didn’t understand the meaning of each tone at all. Probably seeing the confusions from everyone's face, Gareth began to introduce himself and this exhibit 15 minutes later.

Gareth Walsh is a lecturer at UCLA and interested in creating artwork that questions the boundaries of perceived reality and focusing on the illusionary properties developed through the manipulation and recombination of its parts. The Dow Jones index is a real-time index that shows how 30 large publicly owned companies based in the United States have traded during a standard trading session in the stock market. Gareth’s exhibit vocalized the Dow Jones: The change of the index is updated in real-time and the magnitude and direction of the change are combined together and corresponding to the musical scale “Do re mi fa so la ti,” where 0 is a little higher than “fa”, “ti” means a major increase and “do” means a major decrease. As Gareth explained his exhibit, I began to understand the insight of each single tone which seemed to be meaningless to me at the beginning. It was so impressive that the Dow Jones index was updated in real-time and the tones were also updated corresponding to the change of Dow Jones Index. Writing a song by using stock index sounds pretty interesting and combines the art and science.

After many years of study of economics and finance, we haven’t found an effective way to predict the stock market for a short period and we can only predict the general trend of the stock market. The visualization of data may provide us with a new approach and Gareth’s Dow Jones exhibit is a good example. Data visualization is not only a tool to communicate with non-experts more clearly and effectively through graphical or vocal means. It should also provide an entirely new point of view of data we have and thus inspire researchers to find different way and approaches.

I really enjoyed Gareth’s exhibit. It combines the art and science well and is also interesting and educational. I hope through data visualization we can find new approaches and make break through in many different areas. 

Citations:

1. "Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti." . N.p., Online Posting toSongwriting Unlimited. E-mail. <http://www.songwriting-unlimited.com/do-re-mi.html

2. "Journalism in the age of data." . N.p., Online Posting toStanfordedu. E-mail. <http://datajournalism.stanford.edu/

3. Walsh, Gareth. "GARETH WALSH." . N.p., Online Posting toUCLA Design Media Arts. E-mail. <http://dma.ucla.edu/faculty/profiles/?ID=84>.

4. Image by self at event 2013

5. "Datawatch (DWCH): More Value Creation." 03 10 2013. N.p., Online Posting to gurufocus. E-mail. <http://www.gurufocus.com/news/230504/datawatch-dwch-more-value-creation>.

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