Stock market mountains

After seeing stoxart, I was reminded of Michael Najjar’s project High Altitude from 2010-ish. He used photos he captured while climbing Mount Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas, as the backdrop for stock data:

The series visualizes the development of the leading global stock market indices over the past 20-30 years. The virtual data mountains of the stock market charts are resublimated in the craggy materiality of the Argentinean mountainscape. Just like the indices, mountains too have their timeline, their own biography. The rock formations soaring skywards like so many layered folds of a palimpsest bear witness to the life history of the mountain – stone storehouses of deep time unmeasureable on any human scale. The immediate reality of nature thus becomes a virtual experience. Such experience of virtuality is strikingly exemplified by the global economic and financial system. If the focus used to be on the exchange of goods and commodities, it is now securely on the exchange of immaterial information.

The above is the price for Lehman Brothers from 1992 to 2008.