TerraEconomics – Monique Grimord (US/NL)

Exhibition
When
Fri 12 May—Sun 21 May
Where
Looiersgracht 60

TerraEconomics first sketches out world where the rules are different and into this world it adds in a machine that would make it possible to read the health of the earth before financial transactions are made with it. TerraEconomics is a speculative value system and vision about the earth’s resources. We are currently heavily dependant on the mining and trading of metals, minerals, oil and other natural resources. This project offers an alternative to the Bloomberg trading system by implementing real time environmental health data to influence the stock market.

What if the stock market was not determined by supply and demand but by the health of the earth and resource extraction? Many things in our society would be different.

TerraEconomics (2016 – 2017) investigates the information devices a financial speculator in this fictional world would use. Grimord imagined an alternative tool for this fictional world bio market, an office data visualization that is connected to a biolab, which the speculator could experiment with. Testing different controlled environments, the device would vibrate and blink in the secret language of the bio market, and the speculator uses it to try to feel the future, and decide whether he should bet high or low in this environmental stock market.

In the fictional future premise, an algorithm is developed that measures how each and every small quantity of manufactured material negatively affects the earth’s environment. A supercomputer watches global trade routes, as well as reads the dynamic feedback of the living bio material of the earth collected from data points all over the world, in the oceans, forests, and atmosphere. A couple of nations decided to experiment with their economy in a radical way: no longer are the value of goods determined by the invisible forces of supply and demand, but by the flux of the natural environment, the Earth’s A.I. They call this unique system terra-economics.

BIOGRAPHY

Monique Grimord is an American interactive designer and artist based in Amsterdam. She uses inventions as a story-telling device for brands, and design fictions as a method of cultural commentary.