At the bottom of the pyramid

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Inflations and expirations

Akershus kunstsenter, Lillestrøm, October 2009

”Inflations...” consisted of four loosely connected works/ installations. The two smaller were made out of bubble wrap, playing with the recent finance/ stock/ property marked “bubbles”. A larger piece visualized two hundred companies/ organizations choice of “core values”.

Participating in online poker tournaments generated the last work. This piece, called At the bottom of the pyramid, was a pen and ink drawing in 24 parts, covering two walls in the largest room of the gallery.

The drawing depicts my 1000 $ contribution to the price pool of a large live tournament by unsuccessfully trying to qualify online. I played 31 tournaments for 33$ each, made it to the (online) finals 7 times, but failed to win these.

Data from the games is translated onto a decorative, but readable language of signs. To read them isn’t easy though, it’s quite an information overload…

The arrangements of signs are chained together to form graphs, describing the ups and downs of my chipstack/ capital through each of the 31 tournaments.

The piece visualizes both a flow of information and currency. It continues my explorations of statistics-as-art from the previous projects SuperSystematic and 100 Courses, but combines it with the visual language from Poker Drawings I and II.