Russian Artist Makes Music Using Bitcoin Market Data

Is this the sound a bitcoin market makes?

Russian artist Dmitry Morozov, also known as ::vtol::, recently debuted a new art technology installation entitled silk that uses live data from bitcoin and litecoin markets across five different currencies to create music.

The work was shown this past weekend during Cosmoscow, a contemporary art festival held in Moscow. According to the artist’s website, silk is a kind of autonomous stringed instrument that responds to price changes denominated in rubles, yuan, euros, and US and Canadian dollars. The software draws bitcoin price data from BitcoinWisdom.com.

Here’s how Morozov describes the work on his official website:

“The installation is tracking the real time changes in the market activities related to [the] cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Litecoin – independent and uncontrolled by any state peer-to-peer payment systems. [The] constantly changing currency rate of Bitcoin against major world currencies is influencing the strain of strings in [the] installation and the way the picks are hitting them. The robotic system of the artwork is directed by a computer algorithm: influenced by dynamic changes of data, the installation sounds like a complex sound instrument.”

Morozov said that the work was co-commissioned by Laboratoria Art & Science Space, a contemporary art organization based in Moscow, and a company called Lykke AG.

“They were asking me to find some idea that will combine art and finances - and I think bitcoin is a very interesting ‘new’ thing that can change society,” he told CoinDesk in an email.

The result, as the video shows, is a strange, metallic and ever-changing soundscape and an “infinite number of variations and harmonies”, in the words of the artist.

“This piece explores how new technologies and progress in such areas of knowledge as cryptography, mathematics, computer science influence the financial system, inevitably changing the social structure of the society,” Morozov wrote on his website. “These changes can be characterised by growing decentralization, transparency, unfalsifiability, immateriality of values.”

The work comes months after Morozov exhibited another sound-oriented work called Oil, which, according to The Verge, invited participants to record audio of themselves slowly crushing their smartphone or other possessions with a hydraulic press.

Check out a performance of the art installation silk below:

Video Source: ::vtol:: silk from ::vtol:: on Vimeo.

Images via ::vtol::

Hat Tip: The Creators Project