ArtCall Diary - Entry 11/29/2000
Webbittown Corporation - ArtCall Research Dept.
a special report by Katkitty
Here at Webbittown Research, the preparation for
moving to NYC continues. Out of the chaos, we are trying to bring order,
and out of the dangling threads of bills, SSI, mixed talents and ambitions,
we are trying create sustenance. Katkitty has been polishing off some old
code she wrote to look at stock market patterns (gotta have a portfolio
for a resume), using data from the month of August 3rd, 1998. She is interested
in applying various visualization methods to the patterns Red
Ed and the day traders find so entrancing i.e. gap and crap, gap and
go, and flatline. On a larger scale, she is finding ways to visualize the
market as a dynamic, undulating surface. Perhaps there is some synergy
to be found between art, membrane biochemistry, and the stock market.
The first step was to visually arrange each security's
symbol in relation to each other symbol, Katkitty has written a pattern
matching searcher that looked at one day on the NYSE.
Here is a screen shot.
The pattern search started with Red Ed's favorite stock
Coca-Cola (KO), and found that on August 3rd, 1998 Abbott Laboratories
(ABT) had the most similar trade pattern. ABT was 38 points away from KO.
When the two are drawn in our final art piece, they should be 38 points
away from each other. Next, we searched for the closest pattern to ABT,
and the magic program finds ED! This was cool, Con Ed (ED) was a little
closer, at 34 points away.
In the final project, this process would find six relationships
per symbol for a large number of symbols, and organize them in a multidimensional
manner. Katkitty has run a chain of ABT, KO, ED, AEP, AEP, VZN, and WHXPR
to test out the concept in 2D. She feels programming is a sort of poetry,
an extreme extension of the concept of spoken words affecting the shape
of reality, and a form of communication with other programmers.
Delphi (the visual basic for science).
The missing piece to this project showed up in the form
of Paul Higham's 'raum-proben', a simple bit of Java code that organizes
symbols in space based on the distances between them.
Some Java poetry.
August 3rd, 1998 is in the past. The month had a small
rumble, the internet bubble trying to burst, which maybe it has done by
now. In any case, the immediate events are hanging
chads, and the analytic Al Gore diving into Baysian statistics and
hanging chads to win an election, so we folded in a lot of the election
events into our relationships page, along with the Katkitty stock relationships,
and came up with this:
Click on the image below to run the dynamic program!
photos©katkitty
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