I've tried to picture what a single stock share looks like. A handshake? A handcuff? A signed check? Pulling a ribbon of type from a ticking machine? The vast, whirring financial market is, at its core, glyphic. Numerals and arrows and periods and dashes and euros and dollars–through some arrangement, they summon the actual from the virtual. Indoors, I'm play-acting as a day-trader, manipulating not value but the symbols themselves. My condition as a finacialized subject becomes malleable, something I can print, frame, and mount.

In 2018, Jeff Noordhoek—the CEO of Nelnet, America's largest student loan corporation—welcomed Great Lakes Educational Loan Services in the "family." They now control 60% of American student loan debt, including mine. Of course, Netnet is a publically traded company, so the stock ribbon tracking their 5 year expansion and steady growth feels especially pressing to me. The symbols and mechanics governing their business determine ultimately where I'll live, what my job will be, if I can afford to have children—in short my future. I abstractly know that I made this choice, but I'm not sure how or when I made it. The ease of sending an email, of typing type to acknowlege other type, suddenly recasts the entire sequence in a gauzy unreality.

Stock Option(s) aims to contain this unreality as a design. Input a stock abbreviation above (▲). The output visually configures the opening and closing price governing that company as pattern. Press the blue button (●) to save this piece.