Hft the Gardener: Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture

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 ethno-pharmacology of over a hundred psychoactive plants.

He uses gematria (Hebrew numerology) to discover the numerological equivalents of the plants’ botanical names with 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, the world of global capital in which he began.

HFT The Gardener is the fifth title to be published on the work of Suzanne Treister by Black Dog Publishing. Previous titles include Nato, Hexen 2.0, Hexen 2039 and Hexen 2.0 Tarot Deck.