Martin Roth | In September 2017 I Made the Street Listen to the Market

September 7 - October 17, 2017

MARTIN ROTH
IN SEPTEMBER 20I7 I MADE THE STREET LISTEN TO THE MARKET
September 7 - October 17, 2017

The Future city is not for humans. The Anthropocene, the reframing of the Earth in the image of industrial modernity, will be short lived. It will be less of a geologic era than a geopolitical instant. Humans are vanishing. Our cities are not our own. We are building the habitats for life forms other than our own. (Benjamin Bratton)
 
In September 2017 I made the street listen to the market is a new installation by Martin Roth at CUEVAS TILLEARD. The artist filled the gallery window with a cross section of the material from below the sidewalk: heavy rocks, gravel, clay, sand, soil and dust. The occasional piece of trash can be seen. This vertical landscape has been burrowed through with tunnels suggesting the presence of mice or rats. Above the horizons of soil and muck a running wheel connected to a music box plays Beethoven's "Für Elise.”  The wheel spins in accordance with the volume of bitcoin transactions per second, tracked 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. With the rate of trade rising and falling, the music hastens and slows in direct proportion, creating an unease and anxiety in the listener. While the layering of soil implicates a geological past, the music plays in real time. Martin Roth sees the behavior of markets as living organisms - governed by fear and desires and following a herd mentality.
 
In focusing on the interconnectedness of the digital economy and its material exigencies, Roth's installation demonstrates the inextricability of the economic subject.