Exhibition - Markets Gallery
As our populations grow larger, more urbanized and more connected, increasingly we look to the planet’s market economies to generate the ideas and incentives needed to meet new challenges at every scale.
Markets are powerful engines of change, and they are themselves designed to extract wealth from every process in a relentless pursuit of efficiency. Our most successful markets, well-tuned and framed by strong legislation, produce a nearly seamless marriage of demand and supply that is staggeringly effective at creating and delivering anything, anytime, to anywhere, if the price is right. In studying this arena we begin to see our true power. The power of markets, brought to bear on the world’s real problems, is the power to change the world.
In the gallery we want to show that markets are efficient and designed tools for wealth creation. This focus liberates us to see the markets as engines for change that can be, or are being redesigned for whatever purpose we value. The room is filled with stories that show both the capacity and promise of markets and their well-designed support systems.
Visitors scan cards to activate videos and stand under audio boxes to listen to verbal stories. Photos Courtesy Institute without Boundaries and Vancouver Art Gallery
A market of ideas In the room we wanted to create a feeling of walking inside a hybrid between a supermarket and a laboratory. Listening to the stories, visitors follow different logics while shifting the focus from capital to ideas, from means to end.
The Massive Change “credit card” is the tool used to access markets stories. Photos Courtesy Institute without Boundaries and Vancouver Art Gallery
Scan your way through Giving visitors this credit card in the beginning of the show, allow us to play on the icon of shopping. The barcode is arguably the most wide-spread graphic design. Every day 5 billion barcodes are being scanned around the world.
The beginning of the China Story. Photos Courtesy Institute without Boundaries and Vancouver Art Gallery
The consumer technology We use a barcode scanner with a colour touch-screen as the platform to tell the stories. Daniel Wigdor and Maya Przybylski did the programming of the barcode scanners and Symbol Technologies generously lent the barcode scanners, called the MK 2000 Micro Kiosks. See the videos from the bottom of this page.
Photos of the visionaries featured in the room cover the backsides of the kiosks. Photos Courtesy Institute without Boundaries and Vancouver Art Gallery
Green is the colour of nature (and cash) As you walk through the room, visitors will notice faces on the other site of the kiosks. These are people who represent the story the visitors have just seen. In case of line-ups at the MK2000s, visitors can get stories also by listening to interviews from the sound cones in the ceiling. Muhammad Yunus from Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and the evolutionary economist, Hazel Henderson. Listen to the 80 seconds interviews from the bottom of this page.
Audio Commentary by:
Bruce Mau
Tobias Lau (IwB 2004)
Quicktime Videos:
Is branding a tool for only the Western world?
Who has more people in uniform than the US Army?
What is seamlessly connecting the global market?
Who dares to become more capitalistic than the capitalists?
Why does capitalism triumph in the West and fail everywhere else?
Is economy more powerful than ecology?
Explore the Exhibition:
Exhibition Introduction
Urbanization
Movement
Information
The Image
Markets
Energy
Materials
Military
Manufacturing
Living
Wealth & Politics
