Archive Cinema City 2009.

Natalie Jermijenko and The Bureau of Inverse Technologies / Despodency index (Indeks potštenosti)

descriptions of exhibition works





Programme selection: Wealth of Nations

Despondency Index offers a graph that combines a financial share price indicator and the levels of social despondency. The idea, produced by Natalie Jeremijenko and the Bureau of Inverse Technology, superimposes the suicide rate in San Francisco, from 1996-2000, on top of the Dow Jones index.

What the Bureau demonstrates with the DI10 is that the Dow Jones Industrial is radically exclusive information: a highly privileged yet very partial representation, an arbitrary economic performance of 50 companies which in no way could or does represent tragic social phenomena such as suicide in the Information Age.

Biographies of the artists and the groups:

Natalie Jeremijenko (1966) Her work takes the form of large-scale public art works, tangible media installations, single channel tapes, and critical writing. It investigates the theme of the transformative potential of new technologies - particularly information technologies. Specific issues addressed in her work include information politics, the examination and development of new modes of particulation in the production of knowledge, tangible media, and distributed (or ubiquitous) computing elements. An important part of Jeremijenko's artistic strategy is to enable public discourse through access to accurate information about scientific claims.