Book launch and conversation
Free admission
February 26, 2024, 7pm
172 Classon Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA
For the US launch of Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023) join us at e-flux on Monday, February 26 at 7pm for a conversation between editor Gary Zhexi Zhang, and Kei Kreutler, Laura Serejo Genes, and Nolan Oswald Dennis.
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 on Wall Street and the City of London, celestial motions provide a cosmic guide to the mood of terrestrial markets.
As the title exclaims, this book explores the time of catastrophe: the weird temporalities that texture the making and unmaking of worlds. In particular, it attends to the ways in which reality is shaped by technologies of time and of belief: the evolution of finance, economics and insurance; predictive processes like simulation, mitigation and forecasting; conspiratorial plots and accidental manifestations.
Bringing together artists, researchers, and interstitial practitioners, Catastrophe Time! explores what happens when reality loses its grip, and the temporalities we take for granted are radically disrupted, or reveal themselves—generatively or disastrously—as fantasies. By sampling temporal practices and operative fictions already playing out in our midst, it seeks ways of thinking, feeling and acting in multiple, heterogeneous worlds which nonetheless unfold as one.
Contributors include Diann Bauer, Philip Grant, Bahar Noorizadeh, Habib William Kherbek, Klara Kofen, Kei Kreutler, Suhail Malik, Bassem Saad and Gordon Woo.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.