Soren Thilo Funder

Island ECN held offices on the 10th floor of 50 Broad St. in the financial district of New York City through the nineties. Island ECN housed the ultimate avant-garde of high frequency trading, king of the plumbers, those that understood to bank on the very plumbing facilitating the transaction of the stock rather than the stock it self - and it was here that high frequency trading was conceived, leaving its distinct mark on the future of economics. A form of trading outmanoeuvring human faculty, the speed of every micro transaction weaving ever-new threads in an opaque unstable neuro-network of hyper-connected currents. Plumbers (lizard bazooka sea monkey turtle tower terminal) forms a meditation on the unfathomable literal mess that this office space where left in and how the absurd otherness of it, contrasts how the financial market (and with it algorithmic transactions) is considered norm in contemporary society, shaping a sort of absolutism from where all societal and personal imaginations ultimately must emerge. The market, as incontestable constituent of our realm of imagination, is somehow challenged in this eerie meeting with the physical mess it sprang from. Perhaps the notion of this untidy and anarchic place of origin still enables ideas of counter-understandings and the potential of sabotage, restructuring or hacking of these systems that appear as solidified structures in contemporary society - dark, manipulative, avaricious, cynical structures, yet solid as ever.