|
About LIX
How do you pronounce "LIX"?
"Licks."
What is the LIX Index?
The LIX Index is an artist project that was live from 2002-03. The project envisaged a
weekly index called The LIX that tracked the performance of London-based artist Lucy
Kimbell. Just as a stock exchange index aggregates a number of underlying
stocks, so the LIX Index model includes many different sorts of underlying data
that together form a picture of how Lucy Kimbell is doing. This web site
is the only place you could see how the LIX Index was performing. The LIX
Index project by Lucy Kimbell was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella
for Channel 4 television and the Arts Council of England, for its
Identinet project (http://www.identinet.net/). The site
was launched in April 2002 and was live for one year. The LIX was
first launched as an idea in January 2001 through another art project, a
commission by Film and Video Umbrella. A short film about Lucy Kimbell and
the LIX Index by Brad Butler was broadcast on Channel 4 on Tuesday 16
April 2002. Other later projects such as the BBC's Celebdaq have popularised the idea of an individual being represented in this way.
What makes the LIX go up or down?
Kimbell tried to identify
the events that affect her performance. These extend the ideas developed
in the original LIX concept and include the following factors: emotional,
physical, financial, spiritual, cultural, social, and environmental. The
LIX is calculated weekly by taking in the latest data supplied by Lucy
Kimbell in ten categories. These are combined into about 20 groups, which
called 'assets'.
How often is the LIX updated?
Kimbell designed the LIX Index to vary weekly, mostly for practical
reasons. Some of the underlying factors change more frequently but Kimbell
felt that a dynamic weekly portrait would probably be sufficient to test
the idea.
How is this anything to do with art?
The short answer is "Unless you are deeply immersed in contemporary
art, itíll turn into a fairly long and incomprehensible answer so if
you prefer just think of the LIX as something funny." The longer answer
is that the LIX was inspired by innovations both in contemporary business
practices and within other domains such as new media, public art, psychology,
and design. In the second half of the 20th century, many
artists experimented with making new forms of art in which there was
not necessarily an art object to view. Meanwhile business was finding
it necessary to develop conceptual models that shed light on what goes
on in organisations and in markets. The LIX inherits both these traditions
and tries to disturb them.
Didnít David Bowie do something like
this?
No, not exactly. David Bowie is a famous recording artist
who has sold lots of records and is likely to continue selling records. He
created some financial assets called ëBowie bondsí to allow him to access
the value of future revenues from the sales of his records. Lucy Kimbell
is not a famous artist. She considers the LIX Index to be an artwork and
that by creating it and making it live via this web site, she is
contributing to discussion about how value is measured and discussed.
Where can I find out more about the ideas behind
the LIX?
In developing the LIX Index, we appropriated ideas promiscuously
from a wide range of contexts and practices to explore ways of thinking
about performance measurement and the presentation of data. Here are
some.
The CGE&Y Center for Business Innovation in Cambridge, MA, has done
interesting thinking about how to measure the value of intangibles. CBI
director Chris Meyer is co-author with Stan Davis of Futurewealth (Harvard
Business School Press, 2000). http://www.cbi.cgey.com/
The Performance Measurement Association is a network of practitioners
and academics from different contexts sharing knowledge and ideas about
measuring performance. http://www.performanceportal.org/.
Lucy Kimbell is presenting a paper at its PMA 2002 conference in Boston in
July.
The Hollywood Stock Exchange http://www.hsx.com/ where visitors buy and
sell virtual shares of celebrities, movies and music with a currency
called the Hollywood DollarÆ.
SmartMoney MarketMap 1000. This is a tool that displays market
information in ways that are more intuitive than standard 2-d graphs. https://ecommerce.smartmoney.com/ecommerce/login?cmd=displayPromo&promo=1
Risk Grades Risk Map of the Market. As above. www.riskgrades.com/retail/treemap/treemap.cgi
The Attention Economy. A book from the director of Accenture's
Institute for Strategic Change, Thomas Davenport, and John C Beck (Harvard
Business School Press, 2001). The site offers a web tool to help you
create an attention landscape that shows you what you really spend your
time doing. www.attentionbook.com/
Theyrule.net, a site that reveals interesting connections between loci
of power and influence. http://www.theyrule.net/
The Foresight Exchange Predictions Market at http://www.ideosphere.com/ enables
you to bet on claims that may or may not come true by a specific date ñ
thinks like finding a cure for AIDS and when World War 3 might happen.
Here is the UK governmentís Department for Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs with its latest Quality of Life index. www.defra.gov.uk/news/2002/020313b.htm
Elsewhere at the Department of Trade & Industry, much thought has gone
into finding ways to measure how much construction happen and whether it
is sustainable. www.dti.gov.uk/construction/kpi/index.htm.
Here are the controversial School League tables www.dfes.gov.uk/performancetables/.
Within the arts, performance index means something entirely different;
here it means a list of references to material about performance
art.
www.thing.at/performance-index/info.html
Management consultants McKinseyís E-performance scorecard.
www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_page.asp?tk=426697:975:24&ar=975&L2=24&L3=45
The Societal Performance Index. This page esl.jrc.it/envind/eu_spi/spi.htm
explains the background to the idea. Or just have a look at a picture that
more or less explains it at a glance esl.jrc.it/envind/indexspi.htm.
|
