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With Open Outcry, New York artist Ben Rubin proposes a sound installation that evokes the trading floor at the New York commodities market. The work intersperses sounds of calling on the trading floor with interviews with brokers about their profession, their experience of working the market and about the September 11 tragedy.

The sound piece Open Outcry starts off with an atmospheric sound. We float in it. Next thing we hear is a cool female voice announcing the prices of commodities. “Platinum, down 49.00. Orange juice, down 94.55. Oil, down 51.50...” The dispassionate voice suggests an abstract and de-humanized economic environment. We have entered the numerical space of commodity prices.

Suddenly, the background sound becomes more prominent and changes scale. We take off. A strange hot clamour of shouting voices can be heard, far off at first and then coming closer. Men’s voices competing with each other. We are on a trading floor: a place of people, no longer a place of numbers.

The voices hush, and one of them starts to speak. The voice belongs to a woman broker, explains how she puts in her orders: “if I want to buy Octobers, I don’t say “October”, I say ‘Oc’.” And to illustrate her point she shouts “Oc at ten!” The broker also comments on the advantage of being a woman on a trading floor of men, because her voice is immediately distinguishable from the rest, and her orders are easily recognized. We go back to the trading floor and to the shouting. The microphone moves to two brokers who reflect on the experience of working on the trading floor. “It’s like going to symphony and hearing each part of the orchestra at the same time as you’re listening to the music.” Another broker talks about how the personal is mixed with the financial on the floor: “you can tell by the tone of voice when a broker is bluffing.”

This sound installation by Ben Rubin defends the human aspect of stock markets. The sound clips of the trading floor are taken from live recordings of the buying and selling of commodities at the New York Mercantile Exchange. Those clips, combined with the interviews, offer the public a real and inspiring vision of the personal side of finance.

Paradoxically, today trading floor brokers are an endangered species. The trading floors, daily stars of the financial section of evening news programmes, embody the market for the general public. They convey a passionate, energetic and enormously gregarious image of the markets, which the great investing public can relate to.

However, one after another, the markets have replaced human trading floors with computer screens. The world’s first electronic market, the Nasdaq, opened in 1971. Since then, the markets of Paris, London and Frankfurt have changed to the electronic system. Even the New York Stock Exchange is experimenting with a mixed electronic-human system. The reason for this change is also reflected in other installations on display in this exhibition: the extraordinary capacity of current technology to represent economic situations. In addition, the incorporation of new media like Internet into the equation has increased potential participation exponentially. More investors means more liquidity, and therefore better prices. Despite all this, Ben Rubin’s installation constitutes a celebration and defence of the live human factor in markets.

Open Outcry was exhibited at the WorldFinancialCenter, in October 2002. The WorldFinancialCenter is an office complex next to the former WorldTradeCenter. The FinancialCenter houses the offices of the New York Mercantile Exchange, as well as a number of banks and investment funds, such as Merrill Lynch, Nomura Securities and Oppenheimer Funds. Rubin’s installation was part of SonicGarden, an exhibition of sonic art in the atrium of the WorldFinancialCenter to commemorate the reopening of the WorldFinancialCenter one year after the tragedy of 9/11. Other artists invited to take part included Laurie Anderson, David Byrne and Marina Rosenfeld.

The evocative voices of Open Outcry are characteristic of the work of Ben Rubin, a new media artist living in New York. Rubin has exhibited his work at the WhitneyMuseum, the MITListVisualArtsCenter and the SkirballCenterin Los Angeles. He has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Diller + Scofidio, Ann Hamilton, Arto Lindsay, Steve Reich and Beryl Korot. His piece Listening Post was awarded the Golden Nica Prize at Ars Electronica. Rubin studied at BrownUniversity and the MIT, and he is on the faculty of the Yale School of Art, where he was appointed critic in graphic design in 2004.