Ian Monroe

63mm

Commissioned by ‘Punk and Sheep’ in 2014 and located in a disused office building in London’s financial trading center of Canary Wharf, 63mm is a 63mm wide four story high ‘slice' of an office tower from Canary Wharf that appears to be sinking into the show space floor. Desks, phones, computer monitors, a filing cabinet, an office chair, lighting fixtures, carpet tiles, wires and pipes have all been sliced to reveal an archeology of the modern space of commerce.

During the market bubble of the early 2000's world markets ceased to be run by humans and instead computers began making independent financial decisions. These decisions are measured in picoseconds (one Trillionth of a second). 

Banks began to suspect that if you were in Chicago for example, you were at a disadvantage to being in New York because of the time taken to complete a trade takes longer because light has to travel farther to get to The New York Stock Exchange. It therefore became clear that, time not only equals money, but so does distance. A new explosive property bubble expanded in properties immediately surrounding trading floors and banks competed for the closet locations. 

Around 2008, the shortest possible time taken to request and execute a trade took about 210 picoseconds of back and forth communication between a computer at a bank, and the servers at the trading floors of the major global financial markets. This is equal to 63mm at the speed of light.

The work reveals the shrinking relationship between space and time that has driven the expansion in the speed of information and the globalisation of markets; nowhere is isolated from this compression and subsequent fragmentation of time and money.