HFT The Gardener is 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 investigates the ethnopharmacology 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 FT 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, bankers and corporations. Unaffected by success he continues his parapsychopharmacological research, working on a new algorithm to discover the true nature and location of consciousness.H FT The Gardener extends Treister's fascination with esoteric translation, the cybernetics of consciousness, and the hallucinatory aesthetics that radiate from real-world circulations of power. Her fictional character Hillel Fischer Traumberg is an HFT - a high-frequency trader. But this HFT is also a contemporary version of HCE, the hero of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, who struggles to awake in the wake of modernity's dissolution of the boundaries that separate art, nature, language, math, money, and the traumatic Traum of history.

The Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantai (1922-2008) is best known for abstract, large-format works produced using pliage: the painting of a crumpled, gathered, or systematically pleated canvas that the artist then unfolds and stretches for exhibition. In her study of this profoundly influential artist, Molly Warnock presents a persuasive historical account of his work, his impact on a younger generation of French artists, and the genesis and development of the practice of pliage over time. Simon Hantai and the Reserves of Painting covers the entirety of Hantai's expansive oeuvre, from his first aborted experiments with folding around 1950 to his post-pliage experiments with digital scanning and printing. Throughout, Warnock analyzes the artist's relentlessly searching studio practice in light of his no less profound engagement with developments in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Engaging both Hantai's art and writing to support her argument and paying particular attention to his sustained interrogation of religious painting in the West, Warnock shows how Hantai's work evinces a complicated mixture of intentionality and contingency. Appendixes provide English translations of two major texts by the artist, "A Plantaneous Demolition" and "Notes, Deliberately Confounding, Accelerating, and the Like for a 'Reactionary,' Nonreducible Avant-Garde." Original and insightful, this important new book is a central reference for the life, art, and theories of one of the most significant and exciting artists of the twentieth century. It will appeal to art historians and students of modernism, especially those interested in the history of abstraction, materiality and Surrealism, theories of community, and automatism and making.

Parkett # 66 features collaborations with Angela Bulloch (Canada), Daniel Buren (France), and Pierre Huyghe (France). Huyghe reassesses conceptual art concerns by reinterpreting familiar films and themes in popular culture; he also draws on disregarded aspects of everyday life, such as time and alienation, and brings them back into our awareness. Bulloch's participatory sculptures explore the physical and psychological aspects of space by using simple light and sound effects that require the viewer's active participation. In the 1960s, Buren began producing works by using the striped cloth he calls "a seeing tool, " seeking a new way to make art exist outside the museum and gallery spaces that delimited its socializing capacity. Since then he has continued his striped works and remains one of France's most important and cherished living artists.

Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1842-1939) was an artist, collector, scholar, and historian working at the dawn of the 20th century. Her first and most prominent work, Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color, provides a comprehensive overview of the main ideas of color theory at the time, as well as her wildly original approaches to color analysis and interaction. Through a 21st century lens, she appears to stumble upon midcentury design and minimalism decades prior to those movements. Presenting her work as a painting manual under the guise and genre of flower painting and the decorative arts-- subjects considered "appropriate" for a woman of her time--she was able to present a thoroughly studied, yet uniquely poetic, approach to color theory that was later taken up and popularized by men and became ubiquitous in contemporary art departments. Her remarkable inventiveness shines in a series of gridded squares, each 10 x 10, that analyze the proportions of color derived from actual objects: Assyrian tiles, Persian rugs, an Egyptian mummy case, and even a teacup and saucer. Vanderpoel had a deep knowledge of ceramics and analyzed many pieces from her personal collection. She leaves her process relatively mysterious but what is clear, as historian and science blogger John Ptak notes, is that Vanderpoel "sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination".

Bringing together works from the past 20 years, this book introduces readers to multidisciplinary Belgian artist Maarten Vanden Eynde Belgian artist Maarten Vanden Eynde (b. 1977) has established a research-based practice, which spans diverse social, economic, environmental, and anthropological perspectives. His work covers some of the most important subjects of our time from extractionism, ecology, and colonialism to the after-effects of colonialism. The book is built up as an alternative encyclopaedia of the history of human kind, investigating our influence on planet Earth. It proposes an industrial and post-industrial archaeology of the future, mapping out a speculative "future-fiction" of our evolutionary traces, and offers a survey of Vanden Eynde's work from the past two decades, including Plastic Reef, a massive sculpture made from plastic debris the artist has harvested from all the world's oceans. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: Mu.ZEE, Kunstmuseum aan zee, Ostend.

The first extended study of the renowned artists' collective Fluxus, Corporate Imaginations examines the group's emergence on three continents from 1962 to 1978, and its complexities, contradictions, and historical specificity. Its founder, George Maciunas, organized Fluxus like a multinational corporation, simulating corporate organization and commodity flows, a reflection of how he imagined critical art practice at that time. Despite the collective's critical stance toward the corporation, Fluxus shared aspects of the rising corporate culture of the day. In this book, Mari Dumett addresses the "business" of Fluxus and explores the larger discursive issues of organization, mediatization, routinization, automation, commoditization, and systematization that Fluxus artists both manipulated and exposed in bold relief. A study of six central figures in the group-George Brecht, Alison Knowles, Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Mieko Shiomi, and Robert Watts,-reveals how they developed historically specific strategies of mimicking the capitalist system. These artists appropriated tools, occupied spaces, revealed operations, and, ultimately, "performed the system" itself by employing an aesthetics of organization, communication, events, branding, routine, and global mapping. Invoking "corporate imaginations," Fluxus artists proposed "strategies for living" as conscious creative subjects within a totalizing and increasingly global system, and demonstrated how these strategies must be repeated in an ongoing negotiation of new relations of power and control between subject and system.

Since the 1960s Michael Craig-Martin has developed a vocabulary of imagery based on common, everyday items. In drawings, paintings, installations, and sculptures, he has probed the relationship between objects and images, perception and reality. This book presents recent large-scale sculptures by the artist, produced with exacting draftsmanship and fabricated in powder-coated steel in vibrant shades. The elegant forms of these works appear like drawings in the air. Each three to four meters tall, they depict items ranging from the timeless as in Fork and Knife (green and purple) (2019) to the distinctly contemporary, as in Headphones (magenta) (2019). This volume was published to commemorate the first indoor presentation of the artist s sculpture, at Gagosian, London, in 2019. A beautiful plate section documents each of the works in the exhibition, and dynamic installation views highlight the artist s exploration of spatial relationships through the juxtaposition of color. An in-depth conversation with Craig-Martin by Lynn Zelevansky traces his development as an artist, addresses the centrality of drawing to his practice, and illuminates the relationship between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional in his work.

This extensively illustrated book includes 435 images, featuring never-before-seen archival materials and newly commissioned photography of Burden s studio and property. Burden s work, whether realized or unrealized, was fundamentally driven by a speculative approach to artistic production, one that compelled him to interrogate the physical limits of his own body, social mores, institutional capabilities, and scientific forces. Above all, his work repeatedly sought to test the thresholds of presumed impossibility, making his unrealized works the ultimate example of such measures. The sixty-seven artworks included in this publication offer a unique and unprecedented perspective on the life and working process of this formidable artist.

Chacón's work can be read as a pictorially narrated story of the problems of modern and contemporary painting. Throughout his career, genres and aesthetics are transgressed in his artistic production, "pure" painting is invaded by conceptual art or becomes an installation, and the most radical geometry shares the stage with abstract expressionism. This book is the most complete editorial work dedicated to the artist, one of the main protagonists of contemporary Venezuelan and Latin American art. It contains critical texts by authors of international and national prestige, such as Jesús Fuenmayor, Dan Cameron, Nadja Rottner and Félix Suazo; it also includes a complete interview with the artist by graphic designer and curator �lvaro Sotillo and a detailed chronology by Israel Ortega and Leonor Solá.  Illustrated with numerous reproductions of his works and a selection of previously unpublished historical photographs, it is destined to become an essential bibliographical reference.

Art and literature historians of the future will be flabbergasted that Yokoyama existed in our time. He is a visionary on the level of William Blake. PLAZA is a parade of invention, set to the beat of turning pages. - Dash Shaw (Cryptozoo, Discipline)   Bigger, bolder, and louder than ever before, neo-manga artist Yokoyama Yuichi is back with PLAZA! Inspired by Carnaval in Brazil, PLAZA offers a maniacal extravaganza of marching, dancing, leaping, firing, cheering, smashing, and exploding over the course of 225 eye-and-eardrum-confounding pages. Originally published in Japan in 2019, this oversize English edition of PLAZA brings to full, hyper-animated life the spectacular graphic art of this genre-defying work of avant-garde comics.

The title of this book, "Autofocus Retina" means a configuration of four diamond shaped mirrors connoting the inner mechanics of a camera lens: the photographic eye. Lothar Baumgarten (b. Germany 1944, living and working in Berlin/New York) presents a personal selection of photographs, sculpture, drawings and film, from the late 1960s to the present day. The book follows the creative trajectory of an artist who does not comply with the aesthetic vision of art but who continually questions the logic structuring Western thought and systems of representation. It features essays on Baumgarten's work by Hal Foster, Michael Jakob, Craig Owens, Anne Rorimer and Friedrich Wolfram Heubach. Each text has been chosen by the artist himself along with special graphic illustrations and images.

In "What We Made," Tom Finkelpearl examines the activist, participatory, coauthored aesthetic experiences being created in contemporary art. He suggests social cooperation as a meaningful way to think about this work and provides a framework for understanding its emergence and acceptance. In a series of fifteen conversations, artists comment on their experiences working cooperatively, joined at times by colleagues from related fields, including social policy, architecture, art history, urban planning, and new media. Issues discussed include the experiences of working in public and of working with museums and libraries, opportunities for social change, the lines between education and art, spirituality, collaborative opportunities made available by new media, and the elusive criteria for evaluating cooperative art. Finkelpearl engages the art historians Grant Kester and Claire Bishop in conversation on the challenges of writing critically about this work and the aesthetic status of the dialogical encounter. He also interviews the often overlooked co-creators of cooperative art, "expert participants" who have worked with artists. In his conclusion, Finkelpearl argues that pragmatism offers a useful critical platform for understanding the experiential nature of social cooperation, and he brings pragmatism to bear in a discussion of Houston's "Project Row Houses."

"Interviewees." Naomi Beckwith, Claire Bishop, Tania Bruguera, Brett Cook, Teddy Cruz, Jay Dykeman, Wendy Ewald, Sondra Farganis, Harrell Fletcher, David Henry, Gregg Horowitz, Grant Kester, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Pedro Lasch, Rick Lowe, Daniel Martinez, Lee Mingwei, Jonah Peretti, Ernesto Pujol, Evan Roth, Ethan Seltzer, and Mark Stern

As one of the key figures in the first generation of British conceptual artists and a crucial force behind many of the Young British Artists, Michael Craig-Martin has dedicated a career to complicating the practice and reception of drawing. Often considered the 'high priest of the everyday', he is engaged with the methodical exploration of those objects and design classics that are so often taken for granted: the tap, the clothes hanger, the petrol pump, the Anglepoise lamp. For Craig-Martin, those objects that we value least, simply for their ubiquity, are often the most extraordinary. His is a world of revelation.

An attempt to melt an iceberg with a blowtorch, an indoor lake of tequila, an ascent of Mt Everest, driftwood burnt with sunlight focused through a magnifying glass and a doorbell that emits the sound of a dying star; these are some of the extraordinary artistic strategies covered in this collection. Gathering together texts published since 2002, as well as specially written new essays, In Land traces recent engagements with landscape, nature, environment and the cosmos.

Yoshimasu Gozo's groundbreaking poetry has spanned over half a century since the publication of his first book, Departure, in 1964. Much of his work is highly unorthodox: it challenges the print medium and language itself, and consequently Alice Iris Red Horse is as much a book on translation as it is a book in translation. Since the late '60s, Gozo has collaborated with visual artists and free-jazz musicians. In the 1980s he began creating art objects engraved on copper plates and later produced photographs and video works. Alice Iris Red Horse contains translations of Gozo's major poems, representing his entire career. Also included are illuminating interviews, reproductions of Gozo's artworks, and photographs of his performances. Translated by Jeffrey Angles, Richard Arno, Forrest Gander, Derek Gromadzki, Sawako Nakayasu, Sayuri Okamoto, Hiroaki Sato, Eric Selland, Auston Stewart, Kyoko Yoshida, and Jordan A. Y. Smith. Introduction and notes by Derek Gromadzki. Edited by Forrest Gander.

In less than two decades, digital networks have moved from providing a macro background environment - actively accessible by only a small coterie of scientists, experts, and state or corporate agents - to pervading and augmenting our lives at an increasingly micrological level. As our world is plugged into the matrix, we know from direct experience that the pace of change is feverish, the scope infinite and the effects in need of constant reckoning. The Post-Media Lab offers a space in which to examine, reflect and operate upon the networked, mediatised society from an unhurried perspective. We seek to slow down the machinic pace of 'cybertime' just enough to allow for a different tempo of thought to engage and encompass it. Through a programme of four bi-annual residency cycles spanning 2012 and 2013, the Lab has provided participants (artists, technologists, film-makers, activists, cultural/media theorists) with the practical and intellectual support and resources to build real-world, aesthetic, technical or theoretical assemblages which operate acutely on the interface between digital networks and social and political life.