Psi Psi Psi

Psi Psi Psi is a program (dynamic but non-interactive or, at least, non-participatory) that, continuously and in real time, brings about the transformation of a landscape, representative of Portuguese flora, according to the fluctuations of the Portuguese Stock Index (PSI-20).

The program does not aim to be a tool for financial analysis, nor a technical or scientific record of information, but an aesthetic object that, more than representing data, uses it as a starting point for the development of a (temporal) artistic body, built to a greater extent by the behaviour of the stock market than by the artist.

The piece is born of the political and economic present, of the growing spread of liberal ideals and of the insistent tendency to privatise the public sector. It is, more than anything else, a reflection on how economic and capitalist realities directly affect, influence and condition the social, cultural and, ultimately, territorial realities of a country. It is not a comment on climate change: what is at stake is the relationship that Society maintains with Territory, understood here as an object.

From the viewer’s point of view, the program appears, initially, to show only a static image of a mountainous landscape. Over time, however, it becomes noticeable that the image transforms, gradually and slowly, growing steeper or approaching a plain, according to the variations of the index.

Instead of generating the landscape in real time, the variations are pre-rendered and the program simulates the transformation. The focus of the program is not computing power, but the mapping, slow and intentional. The program does not translate the value of the index: it responds to its movement, and always from where it already is. With each reading, a rise moves the landscape a third of the way remaining towards maximum relief; a fall, a third of the way towards the plain. Past the midpoint, the displacement is damped. The transition is then distributed across the following sixty seconds, frame by frame, with cross-fading. The landscape seen at a given hour is not, therefore, the illustration of a value, but the reflection of an entire day of market fluctuation, which can only be understood as accumulation.

Outside session hours, the program enters a continuous sweep between the two extremes of the relief, awaiting the next opening.