Catastrophe Time! Book Launch

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.

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, amongst others. He is the editor of Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic published by Whitechapel and The MIT Press.

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).

PRAISE FOR CATASTROPHE TIME!:

"As Etel Adnan said: ‘Life is Thinking.’ Zhang’s book will make you think." — Hans Ulrich Obrist

Catastrophe Time! is a multi-scalar, exuberant look into the edges of the conceptual infrastructures that dictates 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

“Catastrophe Time! deserves its exclamation point. This wide-ranging, wildly imaginative collection of cross-genre writing approaches our age of compounding crises with curiosity, enthusiasm, and urgency. It gave me 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

"It's Catastrophe Time! But the catastrophe runs much deeper than we might expect. 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

Are Weather Magic and High Finance interchangeable or part of the same re-enchanted complex? Read this extraordinarily lucid book at your own risk. — Michael Taussig, author of The Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown

Host or Publisher Gary Zhexi Zhang