NEW YORK, NY.- The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum launches its first online exhibition, Åzone Futures Market, a web-based simulated stock market that explores the potential effects of a world increasingly shaped by emerging technologies. Audiences can access Åzone Futures Market online and can visit and engage with Åzone Terminal, a physical installation featuring interactive visualizations of the marketplace in the Seaport Culture District, a vibrant new cultural hub in Lower Manhattan.

Åzone Terminal opened to the public at 6 pm on Friday, October 23, at 181 Front Street in the Seaport Culture District. Åzone Terminal is presented in collaboration with the Center for Architecture.

Audiences can access Åzone Futures Market online and can visit and engage with Åzone Terminal, a physical installation featuring interactive visualizations of the marketplace that opens to the public at 6 pm on Friday, October 23, at 181 Front Street in the Seaport Cultural District.

Experimental in spirit and design, Åzone Futures Market invites audiences to learn about and take a position on technology-enabled futures that until recently were confined to prototypes or science fiction. Market participants receive 10,000 cåin (Å), the Åzone currency, to invest in futures on the simulated market conditioned by emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, commercialized space travel, and genetic manipulation. Dynamic pricing based on supply and demand, crowd-sourced news feeds, and visual trend analyses provides users with the real-time information needed to make investment decisions.

“We need new cultural forms to make sense of the radical effects of technological change on our lives today. Åzone Futures Market experiments with the architecture of exhibitions, replacing a physical building with a digital platform, allowing visitors to become users, and enabling contributors to respond to an environment that will emerge over time,” said Troy Conrad Therrien, Curator, Architecture and Digital Initiatives.

Guggenheim curatorial staff are analyzing and interpreting market activity and will profile investors who make the greatest impact on the market in posts on the Åzone Futures Market blog. Artists, architects, and theorists will intervene in the market periodically after it has stabilized.

The exhibition concept grew out of a retreat on the Åland Islands off the coast of Finland organized as part of the Guggenheim Helsinki Now: Six Finalist Designs Unveiled exhibition last spring. It is the first program in what will be a sustained investigation by the museum into the intersection of architecture and new technologies.