Suzanne Treister : hft the gardener

HFT The Gardener presents the culmination of a project comprising multiple bodies of work by the fictional character Hillel Fischer Traumberg. Traumberg is an algorithmic high-frequency trader (HFT) who experiments with psychoactive drugs and explores the ethnopharmacology of over 100 psychoactive plants.
He uses gematria (Hebrew numerology) to discover the numerological equivalents of the plants’ botanical names among the companies in the Financial Times Global 500 financial index. He communes with the traditional shamanic users of these plants whose practices include healing, divining the future, entering the spirit world and exploring the hallucinatory nature of reality. Traumberg develops a fantasy of himself as a techno-shaman, transmuting the spiritual dimensions of the universe and the hallucinogenic nature of capital into new art forms. He becomes an outsider artist whose work is collected by oligarchs and bankers from the world of global capital in which he began.