Value Quest—Art of Fortune & Economy of Risk

A socio-economic cycle depicted as a roulette, a chaotic nonlinear system, whose ultimate goal the Art of Fortune is reachable only through the Economy of Risk.

Urtica’s statement:

The effects of globalized economy and the free trade ideology brought unrestricted deregulation of the global financial system, of international trade, of labor markets, caused displacement of industries, and enforced privatization which was often recklessly done.

Our artistic act was focused on identification of available and necessary assets whose goal were production of artwork. Trough activation of analytic and representational forms characteristic for business milieu, we distinguished three requisite elements for art production:

• The Resources, included Personnel, Funds and Capital, Information, and Product and Services. The resources were represented as gallery pillars.
• The Environment, defined by availability of resources. Main characteristics of environment are Homogeneity, Capacity, Mutability, Stability, Domain Consensus, and Concentration. We created an Open document on the wall and invite audience to mark the dominant environment (in their opinion). Most of them stated that dominant dimension of environment in Serbia was Concentration which meant that necessary resources were concentrated and controlled by the small group of people.
• The Strategy, a plan of actions pointed to achieve goal. We made a painting Stratagame, a subjective retrospective analysis of socio-economic environment and our work in the period from 1999 to 2010. Each year was marked by one term Choice, Reduction, Adaptation, or among others.

In life, you often have to make a hazardous maneuvers in order to achieve goal, or to make a random choices to speed the process and to avoid a never-ending exploration of consequences and meta-consequences. From the point of view of current economic crises a socio-economic cycle looks like roulette, a chaotic nonlinear system whose ultimate goal the Art of Fortune is reachable only through the Economy of Risk.

In VQ Roulette, you can play on a single or a range of numbers corresponding to the terms related to the theory of the games/economics like Withdrawal or Struggle, Risk or Safety, etc. You can also bet on resources (Funds and Capital, Information, etc) or dimensions of environment such as Stability or Mutability. A digital roulette wheel selects the winning term randomly. Instead of money VQ Roulette brings into play VQ chips that correspond to diverse aspects of value featured in allegorical guardian symbols of the stinging nettles (Latin: Urtica). Each chip represents different industrial sector inspired by UN classification of industrial sectors. The result of the game determines the score of industrial sectors.

The main prize at the VQ roulette was The Golden Card, that contained one of numerous answers to the question what is value?

Credits: Ivan Blagojević, Programming