Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

COUNTERING CAPITULATION engages with the inquiries following the Flash Crash of May 6, 2010, an event that went down as the biggest one-day market decline in financial history. Focusing on a remarkable forensic analysis that not only contradicted the official findings of the regulatory authorities and shed light on the impact of algorithmic trading but also developed tools to visualize material processes that operate beyond human perception, Nestler argues that in the current legal framework evidence of market events can only be produced by a double figure of the expert witness: when the (forensic) analyst is joined by a whistleblower or informant. With this ambivalent, contingent and marginal figure at its heart—a renegade, a traitor—COUNTERING CAPITULATION proposes a multilayered, transdisciplinary artistic practice: creating narrative instabilities that coagulate dissent into insurrection by enhancing resolution in the technological, social as well as legal meanings of the term. The video concludes with a call for renegade solidarity between the general public and whistleblowers as the contemporary figures of insurrection to counter the excesses of (automated) evaluation and decision-making, not only as regards financial markets but black box regimes in general.

Gerald Nestler combines theory with video, installation, performance, speech and text to interrogate the ideological, methodological and fictive narratives of finance and their role in current biopolitics as well as contemporary art in particular. After graduating from the Academy of fine arts Vienna (1992) he conducted artistic fieldwork as broker and trader (1994-97). He lectures at Webster University Vienna and is completing a PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. Selected recent exhibitions: The New Derivative Order (kunstraum Bernsteiner, Vienna, 2012), Cargo Carry Cult (Kunsthalle Wien, 2013), Forensis (curated by Anselm Franke and Eyal Weizman, HKW, Berlin, 2014), Social Glitch (kunstraum NOE and other venues in Vienna, in prep., 2015). Recent publications: editor of Kunstforum International 200/201 on art and economy (with D. Buchhart, 2010), Paratactic Commons (amber Art+Technology Festival Istanbul), What’s next. Art after the crisis (eds. Johannes M. Hedinger & Tobias Meyer, Kadmos, 2013), Forensis. The Architecture of Public Truth (ed. Forensic Architecture, Sternberg, 2014).