Avásimo (Baseless)

Stock market data from the 2008 financial collapse — Dow Jones, Nikkei, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 — is translated into a musical score. An electronic female voice, processed through a vocoder, follows the score with precision. The voice is feminine, like the voices designed to assist us, to serve, to comply. When algorithms are built to help, they are so often given women's voices. The system speaks through the voice it expects obedience from. A human voice enters, not in obedience but in lament. It responds to the data, departs from it, grieves what the numbers cannot feel. It exists within the system while refusing to be ruled by it. The video displays symbols from the Phaistos Disc, an undeciphered Minoan script possibly from a matriarchal Bronze Age society, now scrolling in the format of a stock ticker: ancient mystery conscripted into capitalism's visual language. Beneath the voices, a sustained drone sounds: the ison of Byzantine chant tradition, a single fixed pitch that served as a tonal anchor for sacred music. Here, it becomes the cost basis, the entry point, the fixed reference against which all market movement is measured, the illusion of stable ground in a system without foundation. Matriarchal symbols forced into patriarchal economic display. Female robot voice obeying the algorithmic score. Human female voice refusing, responding, lamenting. The drone continues beneath it all, as cost basis always does, indifferent to what rises or falls above it. At the end, the human voice fades; the machine inherits its tremor. Nothing holds still. Avásimo: without basis. The ground was never there.


Single channel audio & video animation
Audio duration: 3'17''
Concept, Artistic Direction: Pavlina Vagioni
Original Score: Audra Verona Lambert
Arrangement & Transcription: Pavlina Vagioni
Vocoder & Electronic Processing: Vangelis Yalamas
Vocals: Pavlina Vagioni
Mixing: Vangelis Yalamas
Video Animation: Tasos Tsiaboulas


Commissioned by the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis