Global Art and the Museum Commissions Designers to Interpret the Art Market

Sometimes art and design marry, and it’s a beautiful thing. trans_actions is one such wedding, in which art market data is presented in a visually-exciting format.

“trans_actions is a panoramic data visualization that illustrates the dramatic increase in the number of biennales of contemporary art and the rapid expansion of the art market following the end of the cold war. Visitors enter a large panoramic projection room bathed in animated data representing artists, curators, biennales, and market fluctuations,” according to the project website:  stewd.io.

Design might be the ideal “suitor” to mirror art. And, it’s not often that art engages in self-reflection. However, design systems offer matrices to look at the art market and its behavior—objectively, in this instance, which is refreshing! Further the formal considerations are not lost on their fine art audiences.

Requiring a team of designers, trans_actions was created by Stewart Smith, Robert Gerard Piertrusko and Bernd Lintermann for The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 exhibition at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Commissioned by the ZKM Institute for Visual Media in cooperation with the Global Art and the Museum (GAM) team lead by renowned art historians Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg. Audio compositions by ZKM’s Institute for Music and Acoustics team lead by director Ludger Brümmer.