In Light of the Arc goes inside Shenzhen's future stock exchange, a space that was seen only from the outside in Unsupported Transit (2011). Once inside, a series of relations appear between the material infrastructure required by today’s financial system and the surface of exchange that results from this infrastructure. While today’s markets are touted as pure arenas for efficient price formation, In Light of the Arc suggests that these prices are but one side of the equation. The material underbelly cannot be made to disappear simply through the abstraction of an economics that has become obsessed with an efficiency measured through abstract notions such as liquidity and risk, terms which have themselves been reduced to a technical language that avoids any reference to the meaning which they have outside of this discipline.

In Light of the Arc proceeds by way of other images, the construction of which is never entirely complete. These incomplete images attempt to capture a process of materialization in a place that will soon be driven by dematerialization. The film is split between two screens positioned opposite each other and projected from the same angle that the shots were originally taken from. One of these angles produces the familiar rectangular viewing space, while the other is directed upwards toward the top of the new stock exchange. The familiar tapering of the building facade as it stretches upward is here corrected by the angle of the projection, so that the building remains the same width at both the top and bottom. This view of the image is what an architectural elevation would present. It is what would be seen from an ideal point where the facade would not be affected by perspectival space, an ideal view that is only achieved through a severe distortion of all that surrounds it.