Join us for an afternoon of talks and readings to celebrate the launch of
Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023), edited by Gary Zhexi Zhang.
With Bahar Noorizadeh, Klara Kofen, Jamie Sutcliffe, Suhail Malik and Gordon
Woo.
Goldsmiths, University of London
Lecture Theatre, Professor Stuart Hall Building (LG-02)
80 Lewisham Way London SE14 6NW United Kingdom
Sun, 11 Jun 2023 14:00 - 18:00 BST
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,
Suhail Malik, Kei Kreutler, Bassem Saad, Gordon Woo and Aslak Aamot Helm.
Catastrophe Time! is published by Strange Attractor Press and distributed by
MIT Press. Its publication is supported by Gaia Art Foundation and Art Gallery
of York University. The launch symposium is supported by Goldsmiths, University
of London, Department of Art.
SPEAKERS:
GORDON WOO is a catastrophist specializing in the quantitative modeling of
extreme events. Motivated by his training in theoretical physics, his research
has focused on multiple alternative versions of history. He graduated as the
best mathematician of his year at Cambridge University, completed his PhD at MIT
as a Kennedy Scholar, and was a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is
the author of The Mathematics of Natural Catastrophes, and Calculating
Catastrophe, published by World Scientific Press, and is a visiting professor at
University College London. He is also the editor of the Frontiers journal
section: Geohazards and Georisks.
KLARA KOFEN is a writer, researcher, director and artist with a background
in intellectual history and philosophy. She studied at Glasgow and Oxford,
before commencing her masters at the Guildhall School as a Guildhall Scholar.
She is the co-artistic director of Waste Paper Opera, with whom she has created
five large-scale pieces of experimental music theatre and multiple smaller
projects. Klara’s research interests lie in cross- disciplinary
collaboration, engaging with the communicative space between human an non-human
actors, Early Modern history, and opera as a medium in the context of Western
intellectual history. In her capacity as a freelance researcher and translator,
she works for the research organisation Other Internet, a strategy consultancy
that specialises on international trade shows and Bayreuther Festispiele.
SUHAIL MALIK is Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where
he holds a Readership in Critical Studies. Recent and forthcoming publications
include, as author, ContraContemporary: Modernity’s Unknown Future
(Urbanomic) and ‘The Ontology of Finance’ in Collapse 8: Casino Real
(2014). Malik is co-editor of The Flood of Rights (2017), a Special Issue of the
journal Finance and Society on ‘Art and Finance’ (2016), Genealogies
of Speculation (2016), The Time-Complex. Postcontemporary (2016), and Realism
Materialism Art (2015).
BAHAR NOORIZADEH looks at the relationship between art and capitalism. In
her practice as an artist, writer and filmmaker, she examines the conflictual
and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they suffuse one
another. Her research investigates the histories of economics, cybernetic
socialism, and activist strategies against the financialization of life and the
living space, asking what redistributive historical justice might look like for
the present. Noorizadeh founded Weird Economies, a project that traces economic
imaginaries extraordinary to financial arrangements of our time. Her work has
appeared at the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, Tate Modern
Artists’ Cinema Programme, Transmediale, among others. Noorizadeh has
contributed essays to e-flux Architecture, Journal of Visual Culture, and
Sternberg Press; and forthcoming anthologies from Duke UP and MIT Press. She
holds a PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London where she was a SSHRC
Doctoral Fellow.
JAMIE SUTCLIFFE is a writer, curator, and co-director of Strange Attractor
Press. His writings have appeared in Art Monthly, Frieze, Rhizome, The White
Review, and Art Review amongst others. He is the editor of Documents of
Contemporary Art: Magic published by Whitechapel and The MIT Press, and Weeb
Theory, published by Banner Repeater.
GARY ZHEXI ZHANG is an artist and writer. His writings on art, economics,
history of science and technology have appeared in periodicals including
ArtReview, Journal of Design and Science, and Verge Journal of Global Asias; and
books such as Against Reduction (MIT Press, 2021), Incomputable Earth
(Bloomsbury, 2023), Platforms (Singapore Biennale, 2023), Future Art Ecosystems
III (co-authored with Victoria Ivanova; Serpentine, 2022).
