About The Sunset Index
The Sunset Index is a speculative financial instrument for urban public space — a civic-financial artwork that exposes how cities quietly price scarcity.
The work begins from a familiar frustration: in Los Angeles, parking is a game of chance shaped by scarcity. The curb is a public resource, yet it functions as a tradable asset. Drivers hunt for openings like traders scanning for arbitrage. Enforcement behaves like an unpredictable regulatory regime. Street sweeps erase value on a schedule. The Sunset Index makes this informal economy explicit, revealing the financial logic embedded in a mundane civic task.
The work operates simultaneously as functional software and as a civic-financial artwork. It uses the form of a real market interface to reveal a broader pattern: the moment public space becomes scarce, it begins to behave like an asset. By making that behavior visible — and interactive — the Index surfaces a logic beneath LA's streets that we usually experience only as frustration.
Software, in this context, becomes both medium and argument. The city animates the piece; the user participates simply by witnessing it. By framing parking as a speculative asset, the work foregrounds a larger question: what does it mean when the logic of markets infiltrates the management of public goods? When scarcity, risk, and extraction dictate how we move through shared space?
The Sunset Index does not imagine a future where urban life becomes financialized; it documents the fact that it already is. By treating parking like a futures contract, the work exposes the quiet creep of market logic into civic space — and asks whether a city that prices everything can still be called a public at all.
Future iterations extend the piece beyond the phone: large-scale projections of curb volatility, interventions installed directly onto meters, and physical tickers that render the city's unease in real time. These expansions do not celebrate the system, they surface it, question it, and ask what it means to live inside it.