The Big Crash: art for the pending burst of the real estate bubble by Malte Steiner

The thematic departure point for the piece is the instability of the real estate market as a consequence of extreme gentrification. Something that is actively taking place in all bigger cities around the globe. There is a pending ‘big bubble crash’ awaiting as a consequence of this and the piece deals with the growing instability this movement creates and its effects on society.
The Big Crash is intended to grow, and the first parts are based on a software that mines the Internet for real estate data, here websites that work as intermediaries of rented properties, rooms and flats. Berlin was chosen as an example since the market and the city’s gentrification has expanded in such a high speed over the last few years.

The custom software written by Malte Steiner harvests the data of the real estate websites like prices and square-meters, but also the visuals of the advertisements. These are analyzed with a machine learning algorithm, performing an image segmentation and thus separating objects found in these images into picture fragments. These fragmentations will consequently be used in the different forms of the art piece. The Big Crash is also about media transfer, data i.e. can be translated into physical objects and those back in virtual space. Results of image segmentation algorithm are here painted in oil on canvas. The numerical data of the prices i.e. is transferred to MIDI and OSC data to control synthesizers, creating generative soundscapes.