Network Ensemble
Flash Demons
An edition of 50 silicon USBs, vacuum sealed in a plastic sleeve and screen-printed.
Includes an hour worth of music and an essay by Obsolete Capitalism.
Flash and Demons are sound performances executed by the Network Ensemble at precise times: 8 and 31 years after the symbolic stock market accidents of 6 May 2010 and 19 October 1987. Popularly known as Flash Crash and Black Monday, these are, respectively, the fastest and the first stock market crashes triggered by computers.
The Network Ensemble faces up to these accidents as an entry point to the stream of algorithmic-induced noise affecting money and its survival network. Stock markets are an important node within this network.
Trading on stock markets was once a person to person activity, then person to phone and eventually terminal to terminal. Now, software speaks to software as the living are abandoned in favour of the void of rapidity.
To begin grasping the pressure, acceleration and saturation found in such networks, the sounds of Flash and Demons are generated with software and hardware built by the Network Ensemble and able to translate a variety of network and financial data into sound signals, live.
