Bio

The work of Eline Benjaminsen (NO, 1992) is engaged in the question of how the visuality of socio-economic processes effects our ability to engage with them. She deals with the challenge of perceiving market processes through photographic follow-the-money narratives.

She graduated from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague in 2017 (Department of Photography) with the project Where the money is made - Surfaces of algorithmic capital about the infrastructure of algorithmic trading. She works with a variety of platforms, from museums and galleries to the financial press.

Where the money is made

Antennas on top of old water towers, radio masts and abandoned apartment buildings; the sites depicted in this project are not those one would usually associate with high-finance. Yet, this is where some of the biggest profits are being made today. Here, profits are made at speeds the human brain can’t comprehend. The work documents the resolutely physical landscapes of an immaterial market. It asks for a closer look into how value is being processed in the world today.

Guided by the geometric lines-of-sight between microwave transmitters and receivers, the work documents the places where so-called high-frequency trading takes place. Artificial intelligence and algorithmic technology allow trading firms to operate faster than our human abilities. This type of algorithmic trading currently represents around 70 percent of the activity on the global stock exchanges.

The project consists of a series of photographs, a film essay (5:40 minutes) and a publication (48 pages, salmon newsprint). Weight is put on the possibility of each element (film, photographs and publication) to function both in relation to each other within the context of an exhibition and on their own individually.