Money is, among many other things, a way of exchanging things that aren't similar. Money can also change hands faster than things. Rather than simply standing in for things being exchanged, sometimes money itself, as such, is exchanged. The exchange of different currencies is called "foreign exchange."

The installation represented on a clock the relative values of the euro , the yen and the dollar , as they were reported moment by moment at the turn of the century by Reuters globally. Together, the euro, the yen, and the dollar account for approximately 90% of the global foreign exchange market.

Today, in a networked world, money moves from place to place as data, invisibly, across cables and satellites at the speed of light. A feed from a global financial information network was re-routed into the museum -- not so much to render the invisible visible, but to investigate the luminous immateriality of money and its mutable media. The medium this money is light, and it shows up periodically on screens, as translation of invisible into visible light. Two interfaces with foreign exchange data provided by Reuters were displayed on the walls (1 ). In the foreign exchange market, where roughly 1.5 trillion dollars moves around the globe every day, the relative value of currencies fluctuates over time at high speeds and short intervals.

The high-speed flow of foreign exchange data unfolded in three five-minute segments on the clock: the densest five minutes of data from the last full business day of 1999, and again the densest five minutes from the first full business day of 2000, and in between the entire data flow of 31 December 1999 and 1 January 2000, compressed into a very fast five minutes. Click on the previous text links for the data sets used, and follow the links below to the Java clock representation of the data.