In 2008, Joseph Young, Rachel Gadsden, Rowena Easton and Abigail Norris were invited to participate in Conflux, an annual festival of contemporary psychogeography. We created a walking performance on Wall Street, in homage to Luigi Russolo, which we documented and made into a subsequent collaborative exhibition at BLANK Gallery in Brighton. A special Remix Day invited two additional artists to respond to the exhibition  – artist Johanna Berger and choreographer Ginny Farman.

We arrived on Wall Street on the anniversary of September 11th, in the middle of Obama’s first election campaign and spent 3 days filming, recording, writing and taking the temperature of the streets. What we didn’t know, that as we were performing the final piece at dawn on the Saturday morning, that Lehmann Brothers was to about to collapse, ushering in an era of global financial meltdown and austerity. The sound and video documents we came back with constitute an historical record of “the moments before the crash”.

Derivatives – Conflux festival from Abbie Norris on Vimeo.

“Black Friday” captures Joseph trying to read out the New York Stock Exchange listings from the tickertape outside. The work was published by Ultra-Red on “Fifteen Sounds of the War on the Poor (vol.3)”, under the guise of “Field of The Neo-Futurist Collective”. You can download it here.