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. As with Treister's previous works, parallels are drawn between the microcosm and macrocosm, and their interrelationships. These include the global financial ratings of pharmaceutical companies and the traditional uses of the herbs from which they benefit; the patterns of high frequency trading algorithms and the pulsing mandalas of the psychotropic divine experience; and the hallucinatory nature of reality, the capital markets and the exchange values with which we judge its shifting worth.
