Suzanne Treister

HFT The Gardener/Diagrams

HFT The Gardener/Diagrams by Suzanne Treister exemplifies the artist’s interest in esoterica, cybernetic awareness and hallucinatory aesthetics as an emanation and contrast to the real world through the exploring circulations of power. Her fictional character Hillel Fischer Traumberg—a banker turned ‘outsider artist’—is a HFT, a High Frequency Trader. The character is also a contemporary vision of HCE, the hero of James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, who struggles to wake up in the tumult of dissolving boundaries between art, nature, language, money, mathematics and the trauma of history.

The series HFT The Gardener is a collection of multiple explorations. In one work, the artist uses gematria, Hebrew numerology, to discover numerological equivalents of the botanical names of the psychoactive plants and cross-references them with companies in the Financial Times Global 500 Financial Index. The Diagrams work illustrates the various investigations into the representation of data circulating in the world of High Frequency Trading, concerning companies and the stock market alongside psychoactive drugs and shamanic cultures. Algorithms and diagrams describe Traumberg’s theories about the holographic nature of reality, art and consciousness. Traumberg, techno-shaman, transmutes the spiritual dimension of the universe and the hallucinogenic nature of capital into artistic forms.