SUZANNE TREISTER – HFT THE GARDENER
2016-02-15HFT The Gardener will feature artworks created by the fictional character Hillel Fischer Traumberg, a banker turned ‘outsider artist’.
At work one day Traumberg, a British high frequency trader (HFT), enters a semi-hallucinogenic state that alters his perceptions of the trading algorithms he is working with. Inspired by this experience, he starts to experiment with psychoactive drugs and explore the ethno-pharmacology of plants from which they are derived.
Utilizing the ancient Hebrew tradition of Gematria, which assigns a numerical value to each letter of the alphabet, Traumberg calculates the numerological equivalents of the botanical names of the psychoactive plants and cross-references them with companies in the FT Global 500 Financial Index. Pairing the botanical plants with the companies they correspond to on the FT Index, he spends his days creating groups of prints and drawings inspired by the work of Ernst Haekel which he had loved as a child, and of Adolf Wölfli, whose drawings he had more recently seen on a banking trip to Bern in Switzerland.
Released from his job in the city, Traumberg communes with the traditional shamanic users of the plants whose practices include healing, divining the future, entering the spirit world and exploring the hallucinatory nature of reality. He develops a fantasy of himself as a techno-shaman, transmuting the spirituality of the universe and the hallucinogenic nature of capital into new art forms.
Opposite – HFT The Gardener / Botanical Prints / Rank 4: Google – US – Software & computer services, 2014-15
Exhibition runs through till March 12th, 2016
P.P.O.W
535 West 22nd Street
3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
