Acclaimed Italian studio 
fuse* recently announced the launch of a new project, Treu, which combines economic data, photogrammetry, psychology and history to explore the notion and significance of trust.
Treu is an ambitious real-time audiovisual installation whose starting point was an analysis of the Treuhandanstalt. “From 1990 to 1994, the Treuhandanstalt was the agency responsible for the transfer of state-owned assets of the former German Democratic Republic into private property. The expedited procedure, the blind faith in the market and the socioeconomic consequences made Treuhand's actions the most controversial legacy of the reunification of the two Germanys” - fuse*.
Beginning with this analysis, fuse* explore the dynamics of trust, both on a local level - a psychological construct built and dismantled by families, friendships, work relationships - and on a global scale, evidenced by economic bubbles and recessions, by fluctuating interest rates, and by stock market patterns. “Politics, economics, and our whole modern system are not material realities - they are psychological constructs based on the trust in individuals, in institutions, in the market. We decide to believe in the value of money, to undertake social changes only if we trust the inventions of our collective imagination.”
From its historical and conceptual starting points, the project developed audiovisual articulations of the dynamics of trust, through a series of human and algorithmic gestures and decisions. A recurrent neural network (RNN) was given as an input the IFO Business Climate Index from 1990 to now. The BCI is an indicator of international confidence in German companies and industry, and by extension wider fluctuations in the strength of the European and US economy. The RNN was trained to predict likely speculative market patterns based on the IFO; these patterns were then cross-referenced with other economic parameters including records of key German stock performance, and fed through another neural network. Photogrammetric images of Berlin were linked to the subsequent data patterns, which generated landscapes which evolve over time - and which can evolve further with the input of additional data sources.
From 22 October to 1 November Treu was presented as part of Pochen Biennale in Chemnitz, Germany. The work was displayed as part of a group exhibition at Wirkbau, Chemnitz, which also featured work by Lysann Nemeth, Ute Richter, Via Liwandowsky, Ya-Wen Fu, Katerina Antonopoulou, Fantastic Little Splash and Daniel Pflumm among others.
Treu | Premiere from fuse* on Vimeo.
