Black Shoals; Dark Matter takes the form of a digital planetarium, animating in real-time the activities of worlds stock markets, Each traded company on the world markets is represented by a star, flickering and glowing as shares are traded. The stars slowly drift in response to the complex currents of the market, while outlining shapes of different industries and the huge multinational conglomerates like the signs of the zodiac. The movement of the stocks is based on calculated correlations between the histories of each stock and those of its near neighbours. The stronger the correlation between the histories of the stock prices of any two companies, the more powerful the gravitational attraction between them. Although they start out randomly distributed in the planetarium, over time the stars clot together and drift into slowly changing constellations, nebulae and clusters. Through this technique different industries naturally start to emerge as galaxies. Any general disturbance in a section of the market will have a visible effect on the sky – the collapse of a large company, for instance, may cause a “black hole”, where companies affected will glow very brightly due to the level of trading, and then be pulled in to a single point in a very powerful vortex.

Within this environment, a complex ecology of glowing amoeba-like “artificial life” creatures will emerge. The creatures evolve from first principles. They live in a world composed entirely of money and feed on trading activity. Whenever a stock is traded its’ equivalent star produces food for the creatures – the bigger the trade, the more food is produced. Every creature has a unique ‘DNA’ code that determines its bodily structure and behaviour - a genetic program. The evolution of the creatures is open-ended and over time evolutionary pressures may breed successive generations of creatures that will be better at coping with the conditions of the strange world that they inhabit.

The title “Black Shoals” refers to the “Black Scholes” formula, a mathematical formula invented in the seventies by three young mathematicians (Fisher Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton) that won them the Nobel Prize for economics. The formula attempts to accurately estimate the current value of a share option, and thereby reduce the risk of investing. Based on the formula Myron Scholes and Robert Merton set up a company called “Long Term Capital Management” which was spectacularly successful. It collapsed equally spectacularly in 1998, and with more than a trillion dollars invested, it nearly brought the US markets down with it. We saw this story as a kind of Icarus parable for those attempting to control complex systems. Because the stock market has the kind of cybernetic properties of biological systems and other complex phenomena, it is often studied in the same way as biological systems. This problematically tends to give rise to a sense that the market is somehow a “natural” expression of fundamental forces.