Notes on Gyre (Typhon), 2024, and Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum (‘No Traces Behind’), 2023
Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum, 2023, is vaporware–a speculative economic/electronic/cultural assemblage. Vaporware troubles the distance between the symbolic and the real by introducing complex oscillations into the continuum “virtual/actual”:
Vaporware is a term commonly used to describe software and hardware that is announced, sometimes marketed, but is never actually produced.
Whilst an element of unfulfilled promise exists for all vaporware, the intentionality behind its production can be varied…vaporware is sometimes used by companies to drive up their share prices, to create extra publicity for their brand, or even deter competitors entering a market. In most cases new products become vaporware due to difficulties during development that result in these products falling behind schedule and/or being surpassed by competitor products in the market. It is typical for the companies producing vaporware to promise more than their developers can possibly achieve in the given time frame.¹
Vaporware also drives imaginaries, functioning memetically within the structural logic of capital (including “cultural capital”) as shortcode–operating on the upcode (the human symbolic structure) and the metacode (the physical infrastructure) while leaving out the downcode (functionality, computer ‘code’). Often its “spin off” effects are actualized through other channels.
Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum ² points to the increasing power, virulence, and virtuality of hyperfinancialization, especially of doppleganger “virtual economies” (crypto, in-game economies, “scamworlds”, et al.), mining this near-invisible spectrum for symbolic transactions that translate into real effects. Per Jean-Joseph Goux:
Gold [Marx writes], in so far as it performs the function of coin or in so far as it continually circulates, actually forms only a connecting link between the metamorphoses of commodities. What functions in the symbolic representation is not materialized value but only connection, linkage, relation. The symbolic order of currency is that of pure concatenation . . . in that the circulation process in the world of commodities takes shape as “a link not only of one endless chain metamorphoses, but of many such chains.” ³
The Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum terminal tracks connective movements within dark pools, the little-known but increasingly massive shadow realm of opaque financial markets existing outside public view. In Diving into Dark Pools, Sabrina Buti, Barbara Rindi, and Ingrid M. Werner write:
….there is a growing demand for trading venues that make it possible for institutions to keep their orders secret, offer low commission rates, maximize the chances of trading with other institutions (as naturals), and allow institutions to trade in size at the mid-quote. Such non-displayed pools of liquidity have been present in US equity markets for a very long time.
Nowadays opaque sources of liquidity are often grouped together under a single label (with unfortunate nefarious connotations): dark pools. In broad brush terms, dark pools are characterized by limited or no pre-trade transparency, anonymity, and derivative (almost exclusively mid-quote) pricing. ⁴
Gyre (Typhon)
The “index/instrument” tracked by the Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum terminal is Gyre (from Yeats’s “widening gyre”). The vestigial gyre (in contemporary parlance, “the churn”) animating the dark pools can be visualized as a cloud t-SNE of data or as a fluid dynamics simulation with movements resembling those of typhoons (Typhons) or the spiral arms of galaxies. Goux continues: In this world of circulation, monetary forms are fleetingly articulated, strung together, but not arrested in the form of use-value. . . . Extended circulation thus makes viable. . . a purely symbolic order…
Paul Coulton and Joseph Lindley from Game vaporware as design fictions:
…when General Motors sponsored designer Norman Bel Geddes to create Futurama for The New York World’s Fair of 1939, it transported visitors over a huge diorama of a fictional section of the United States…By providing a glimpse of an unknown-yet-desirable future the exhibition influenced how a nation saw the product that ultimately came to define modern America: the automobile. Promoting this view also undoubtedly benefitted General Motors and therefore we use the term ‘Vaporworld’ to characterize such visions in that it presents a future world in which certain products would make sense rather than promoting specific future products as in the case of vaporware.¹
Vaporware and Vaporworlds are mutually ontologizing. Within the Vaporworld of Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum, the Gyre tracks and indexes shadow economies, visualizing symbolic quasi- and hyper-objects that we interface with knowingly and unknowingly: dark pools, the Falcon and its widening gyre, the Typhon.
The Gyre (Typhon) printing plates “partially actualize” a speculative paper currency pegged to the Gyre. The plates reference the process of the artist/counterfeiter played by Willem Dafoe in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), the mythical chimera the Basilisk, the closed time-like curves of a Gödel universe, and the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 as imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope.⁵
¹ Paul Coulton, Joseph Lindley, Game vaporware as design fictions, Academic Mindtrek ’16: Proceedings of the 20th International Academic Mindtrek Conference, October 2016
² Named for fin de siècle artist and esotericist Moina Bergson Mathers “magical name”, Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum symbolically counters one of the core ideas of her philosopher brother Henri Bergson’s contributions to philosophy: in Bergson’s work memory and traces of the past have real effects on the present and thus the upon the future. Moina’s motto Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum militates in the opposite direction: not a trace remains.
³ Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic economies : after Marx and Freud, Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1990
⁴ Sabrina Buti, Barbara Rindi, and Ingrid M. Werner, Diving into Dark Pools, (January 31, 2022). Charles A. Dice Center Working Paper № 2022–01, Fisher College of Business Working Paper №2022–03–01
⁵ https://science.nasa.gov/resource/first-image-of-a-black-hole/
