Launching today
Capitol Alpha Machine
Free Mac screensavers built from congressional trade data
10 followers
Free Mac screensavers built from congressional trade data
10 followers
3 free macOS screensavers made from real U.S. congressional stock-trading disclosures. Each one is a scene from Capitol Alpha, a generative data piece in the stark black-and-white style of Ryoji Ikeda — pure black, monochrome white, monospace HUD, flat geometry, no glow. - The Ledger — disclosed trades scroll as a live register - Returns Spectrum — a spectrogram of trade timing and returns - Policy Proximity — committee jurisdiction mapped against the sectors members trade in
Hi there,
I'm Sylvain. A while back I worked on CapitolTrades.com, the site that tracks the stock trades members of Congress disclose. I spent a lot of time staring at that data in tables and charts, and I wanted to do something completely different with it: take a dataset people mostly argue about and turn it into something weird and beautiful (in my mind, at least).
The result is Capitol Alpha, 5 generative pieces in the tradition of Ryoji Ikeda and other data-driven minimalists — pure black, monochrome white, no glow.. The scenes looked better on an idle Mac than in a gallery, so I packaged 3 as screensavers.
They're free. No ads, no tracking, nothing phones home, notarized by Apple.
Enjoy