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Catastrophe Time!

Catastrophe Time!

Edited by Gary Zhexi Zhang

$21.95 Paperback

280 pp., 5 x 7 in, 10 color illus., 20 b&w illus.

Paperback
9781913689674
Published: September 5, 2023
Publisher: Strange Attractor Press

$21.95

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A collection of essays, fictions, and interviews exploring the weird temporalities of finance and catastrophe.

Once, financial practitioners plied a hybrid trade as hydrologists, star-gazers, and weather-watchers who sought to discover the natural laws of value and exchange as they did the divine order of an unchanging nature. Today, corporate firms hire trend forecasters and scenario planners to play out strategic fictions in virtual worlds. Hurricane insurance markets simulate a turbulent climate to offer investment instruments to hedge against the risks of the stock market. And for financial astrologers operating in the city of London, celestial motions provide a cosmic map that orients the mood of terrestrial markets.

Bringing together artists, researchers, and interstitial practitioners, Catastrophe Time! pays attention to the conditions of speculative knowledge on an increasingly volatile planet. Traversing a gray zone between rigorous research and operative science fictions, its contributors question how practices of speculation may transform, undermine, and at times exceed, the worlds they set out to model.

Edited by artist Gary Zhexi Zhang, Catastrophe Time! explores the power of temporal technologies—whether currencies, conspiracies, or simulation models—to shape reality through fiction. By bringing together researchers and writers working at the boundaries of temporal practices, including Diann Bauer, Philip Grant, Bahar Noorizadeh, Habib William Kherbek, Klara Kofen, Kei Kreutler, Suhail Malik, Bassem Saad and Gordon Woo, this urgent volume seeks to make sense of the unraveling times in which we live.

Gary Zhexi Zhang is a visual artist and writer whose work explores social infrastructures, technical histories, and conceptual systems. He was born in China, grew up in Birmingham, and is currently based in London. He studied at Glasgow School of Art, Cambridge University, and MIT.

Catastrophe Time! is a multi-scalar, exuberant look into the edges of the conceptual infrastructures that dictate our collective present, and perhaps our collective end. From the personal realm of desire to the imbrications between financial markets, geology and climate, Catastrophe Time! is a weather report and historical tide chart, serving as a critical barometer of our current moment.
Xiaowei Wang, author of Blockchain Chicken Farm

Are Weather, Magic and High Finance part of the same reenchanted complex? Read this extraordinarily lucid book at your own risk.
Michael Taussig, author of The Magic Of The State

Time itself seems to unravel as one journeys through the wealth of essays, fictions, and speculations collected in this volume. Overwhelmed by a historical vertigo, the reader will end up questioning everything—the past, the present, the future, and reality as a whole.
Federico Campagna, author of Technic and Magic and Prophetic Culture

Catastrophe Time! deserves its exclamation point. This wildly imaginative collection approaches our age of compounding crises with curiosity, enthusiasm, and urgency. It gave me a new vocabulary to describe global transformations, and gave me new tactics to swerve away from doom-style thinking. Read it! It will change you!
Elvia Wilk, author of Oval and Death By Landscape

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