An art researcher from Sheffield Hallam University has created a unique exhibition, which portrays the flow of trade on the world's stock exchanges as stars moving in the night sky.

Lise Autogena, professor of cross-disciplinary art at Sheffield Hallam, created the Black Shoals; Dark Matter art project with artist Joshua Portway.

The immersive planetarium installation portrays real-time stock market activity represented as the night sky, full of stars that glow as trading takes place on stocks.

Lise Autogena said: "The planetarium is a real-time representation of the financial markets, driven by huge quantities of live trading data from the world’s stock exchanges. Companies are represented as stars that flicker and glow as shares are traded around the world, the brightness and duration of the glow indicating the volume of the trading activity taking place.

"Feeding on the light of the stars is an ecology of artificial life creatures. Starting from first principles, initially unable even to move, they must learn to survive in an environment composed entirely of money. The evolution of the creatures is open-ended and it is unknown how sophisticated they can become."

Black Shoals; Dark Matter is an evolving project, started in 1998. It was first commissioned for Tate Britain in 2000 and was last developed for Nikolaj Copenhagen Art Centre in 2004.