Strange Attractor Press are incredibly happy to announce that
Catastrophe Time! edited by Gary Zhexi Zhang is now
available to pre-order and will be shipping late May.
We'll have updates on some fascinating launch events soon, but for now
please check out the information below to get a sense of this extraordinary
book's scope!
All the best,
Jamie & Mark
Catastrophe Time!
Edited by Gary Zhexi Zhang
Paperback with flaps
129mm x 198mm
264pp black and white
16pp colour section
ISBN: 9781913689674
£17.99
"Are Weather, Magic, and High Finance part of the same
re-enchanted complex? Read this extraordinarily lucid book at your own
risk"
— Michael Taussig, author of The Magic Of The State
"A critical barometer of our current moment"
— Xiaowei Wang, author of Blockchain Chicken Farm
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.
