Suzanne Treister - The HFT Gardener

HFT The Gardener comprises 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 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, bankers and museums. Unaffected by success, he continues his parapsychopharmacological research, working on a new algorithm to discover the true nature and location of consciousness and to determine whether psychoactive drugs open a portal to the holographic universe.