The Exchange

The Exchange was a text-message-based stock market that traded in percentages of its participants at a 3-day immersive festival. "Entities" who joined The Exchange were issued 100 shares of themselves. These shares could be bought and sold to other Entities in order to gain access to different tiers of shareholder benefits involving the traded Entity's time, energy, and agency.

A desk near the main entrance of the festival hotel was staffed by suited brokerage representatives, who encouraged arriving guests to join, advised them on their portfolio strategy, and issued vanity ticker symbols for a small, personal transaction fee. A ticker board displaying real-time transactions and analytics was broadcast on several screens on the main floor of the hotel.

Over the course of ~36 hours, over 600 of 750 participants registered on The Exchange. They engaged in over 1,750 transactions, exchanging 19,041 shares of themselves. The application sent and received 55,552 text messages.

I designed the tiers of shareholder privileges that gave the shares their value, wrote the copy for the SMS application, and designed the ticker board and the brokerage's graphic identity. On the floor I worked the desk as one of the representatives onboarding new Entities.

The Exchange took over the festival to the point that its producers wrote it into the closing main stage event.