Speculative design installation imagining personal anxieties as tokenized, tradeable financial instruments — exposing the logic of financializing human distress.
Concept
If everything can be turned into a financial asset in a capitalist world, why not our anxieties, fears, and unresolved burdens? Trouble Market imagines a near-future marketplace where personal troubles are tokenized and traded — inspired by the logic of financial derivatives and social media engagement metrics. By exaggerating this economy to its logical conclusion, the work functions as critical fiction: its absurdity makes visible what is otherwise naturalized.
Viewers navigating the interfaces are prompted to recognize how their own anxieties are already harvested by real-world platforms.
The installation
- Screen-based mock interfaces for trading trouble indexes
- Visualizations tracking volatility in "emotional markets"
- Branding and advertising fragments that normalize profiting from someone else's pain
- A concept social network that mocks LinkedIn ("get some trouble")
Teaser: https://youtu.be/-aJRaTjGASk
Acquisition
Collectable as a complete installation (screens, content, prints, installation script) or as large-format prints and video loops. Ideal in darkened space where screen glow reinforces the financial-market aesthetic. Trouble categories can be updated to contextualize the work for different sociopolitical conditions.