Catastrophe Time!

by Gary Zhexi Zhang (Editor)

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.

Genres: Nonfiction

280 pages, Paperback

Published September 5, 2023

Reviews

[Renaud · Rating 4 out of 5]

Une collection de textes extrêmement variés, sur plusieurs sujets divers mais connectés. Absurdité du fonctionnement économique du monde. Je n'ai pas été un grand fan des petits textes de fiction, mais à part ça, la plupart des textes offrent des perspectives fort intéressantes. Beaucoup aimer les deux textes de Zhang et celui de Phillip Grant, comment notre fonctionnement économique affecte-t-il notre relation au temps ? Aux choses ? Fascinant. Le text de Woo sur notre préparation aux catastrophes aussi est incroyable.

[Diego Eraso · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting multidisciplinary mix of writings about time and the transactions of time in our world looking into the far and deep future. It was so much fun to read!

[Juliette Zicot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely interesting multidisciplinary collection of essays

[Bhumikorn Kongtaveelert · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite books of the year — collections of thoughts on fictjons and futurisms in climate and how we respond to it. The financial astrologer and the hazard modeler interviews are my fav.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vertiginous and extremely interesting investigations of the ways in which finance and risk predictions shape our experiences of time, possible futures, and how the acceleration of change in climate chaos calls assumptions about the predictive value of the known past into question.
Very thoughtful and dense with interesting ideas without being opaquely academic