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Review: Volatile Smile, by Beate Geissler, Oliver Sann, and Brian Holmes

Review: Volatile Smile, by Beate Geissler, Oliver Sann, and Brian Holmes Downloaded from http://afterimage.ucpress.edu/ on December 5 2019 BOOK REVIEW Volatile Smile by looking at economic policy since the shift from commodities to By Beate Geissler, Oliver Sann, and Brian Holmes foreign currency trading after 1971, when the US dollar was no lon- Verlag fur moderne Kunst Nürnburg, 2014 ger convertible into gold. This often chilling information about the 180 pp. (sb)/$45.00 (hb) roles of economists, business, and government maps out the webs of interconnections between Geissler and Sann’s five groups of lucid It is hard to reconcile the many photographs: Desktops (2011), volatile smile/high frequency trad- complex and ultimately seri- ing workspace (2010), Chicago Board of Trade (2013), the real es- ous ideas in Volatile Smile with tate (2009), and shooter. The photographs are evidence of a set of the austerity of the photographs. complex policy decisions that gave rise to the primacy of informa- Their unsettling evidence points tion and automated trading: models purposefully designed to take to a surface that is emptied be- advantage of financial instability. The reason for the inclusion of cause meaning lies elsewhere. In Giessler and Sann’s photographs of foreclosed properties becomes order to understand the techno- clear—actually, it was the wave of housing foreclosures beginning in logical substrata—in many ways 2006 that sparked their inquiry into the markets. Holmes describes this is a book of photographs the hybrid (humans and technology) market’s takeover of the glob- about what we can’t see—that al economy identified by former Citibank head Walter Wriston in his keep the volatile, automated fi- 1992 book The Twilight of Sovereignty: nancial markets running, pho- tographers Beate Geissler and What he portrayed with brutal clarity was the transition to a Oliver Sann, professors at the highly integrated financial governance, with no popular mandate, no elected representatives and no responsibility to anything but University of Illinois, Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute profit. This was a cyborg system, integrating human beings and of Chicago respectively, have collaborated with writers whose in- machines in an improvised and rapidly changing network (36). vestigations reveal what the photographs can’t depict. Four salient essays define terms, provide context, outline concepts, and raise questions about a future when electronic trading algorithms “can Holmes continues: “What happened in the City by the Lake in the act on their own without human execution and monitoring” (16), course of the 1970s? What happened were the first fateful steps as contributor Karen Irvine remarks—where algorithms make deci- toward the privatization of government” (37). sions that shape the world in which we live. Karin Knorr Cetina, an Austrian sociologist at the University of Forgoing the spectacle of the trading floor that Thomas Struth Chicago, and German sociologist Dirk Baecker continue their col- and Andreas Gursky depicted in the 1990s, Geissler and Sann, league’s tour of the markets, adding definitions and guiding the working as a study group or investigative team, have chosen to reader through the complexities of information and finance tech- contextualize innocuous objects: desktops, computer screens, the nology, as they consider the implications of automated trading on empty trading floor, and empty interiors of foreclosed proper- social relations. Knorr Cetina develops the conceit of an under- ties. Geissler and Sann include a set of portraits they shot (shoot- ground of hidden operations, in response to Geissler and Sann’s er, 2000), which turn out to be the faces of shooters (we can’t photographs of racks of black screens, signifying the end of a see what they are doing) at the moment of a kill in a video game. scopic regime and the occlusion of human traders in what she These images and the foreclosed properties implicitly amplify calls a “post-social” knowledge society. Baecker, after an impres- questions the market photos raise about the lack of connection to sive critical tour of communications theories, history of science, human consequences resulting from the fluctuations of a volatile and other ideas from Michel de Montaigne to Jürgen Habermas market. The collaboration that results in Volatile Smile resembles and Bruno Latour, presents the possibility that a world structured the investigations of Trevor Paglen, who documents the evidence by the forms of automated high-frequency trading will produce an of other contemporary shadow regimes fueled on abstraction and individual who is capable of dealing with “a nervous ordering of resulting in violence. flows and switches that gain their profile from an idiosyncratic ex- Irvine, curator for the Museum of Contemporary Photography, ploitation of heterogeneity” (94). Chicago, explains the book’s title in her foreword as being a play on And while Baecker seems optimistic about how humans will ac- “volatility smile,” a term used to describe the pattern of a graphi- commodate this networked world, for Geissler and Sann the only cal shape emerging from the difference between the prices of op- humans present in this collection are the animated, even grimac- tions and their underlying stock. Brian Holmes, who has tracked the ing, but impenetrable faces of the shooters. The problematical social and political implications of globalization and neoliberalism meanings of these images—the glowing but empty rooms of the in his blog Continental Drift, takes a geographical and literary for- foreclosed properties, the banal clutter on the desktops and the ay into the current incarnations of the dismal science. In his essay rest—lie not on the surface but elsewhere. “Information’s Metropolis: Chicago and the New Nature of Global Finance,” he outlines the historical development of markets in a city JANINA CIEZADLO is an artist and writer living in Chicago. midway between the agricultural West and the East, and proceeds 40 afterimage 43.3 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism University of California Press

Review: Volatile Smile, by Beate Geissler, Oliver Sann, and Brian Holmes

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Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
© 2015 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.
eISSN
2578-8531
DOI
10.1525/aft.2015.43.3.40
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Downloaded from http://afterimage.ucpress.edu/ on December 5 2019 BOOK REVIEW Volatile Smile by looking at economic policy since the shift from commodities to By Beate Geissler, Oliver Sann, and Brian Holmes foreign currency trading after 1971, when the US dollar was no lon- Verlag fur moderne Kunst Nürnburg, 2014 ger convertible into gold. This often chilling information about the 180 pp. (sb)/$45.00 (hb) roles of economists, business, and government maps out the webs of interconnections between Geissler and Sann’s five groups of lucid It is hard to reconcile the many photographs: Desktops (2011), volatile smile/high frequency trad- complex and ultimately seri- ing workspace (2010), Chicago Board of Trade (2013), the real es- ous ideas in Volatile Smile with tate (2009), and shooter. The photographs are evidence of a set of the austerity of the photographs. complex policy decisions that gave rise to the primacy of informa- Their unsettling evidence points tion and automated trading: models purposefully designed to take to a surface that is emptied be- advantage of financial instability. The reason for the inclusion of cause meaning lies elsewhere. In Giessler and Sann’s photographs of foreclosed properties becomes order to understand the techno- clear—actually, it was the wave of housing foreclosures beginning in logical substrata—in many ways 2006 that sparked their inquiry into the markets. Holmes describes this is a book of photographs the hybrid (humans and technology) market’s takeover of the glob- about what we can’t see—that al economy identified by former Citibank head Walter Wriston in his keep the volatile, automated fi- 1992 book The Twilight of Sovereignty: nancial markets running, pho- tographers Beate Geissler and What he portrayed with brutal clarity was the transition to a Oliver Sann, professors at the highly integrated financial governance, with no popular mandate, no elected representatives and no responsibility to anything but University of Illinois, Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute profit. This was a cyborg system, integrating human beings and of Chicago respectively, have collaborated with writers whose in- machines in an improvised and rapidly changing network (36). vestigations reveal what the photographs can’t depict. Four salient essays define terms, provide context, outline concepts, and raise questions about a future when electronic trading algorithms “can Holmes continues: “What happened in the City by the Lake in the act on their own without human execution and monitoring” (16), course of the 1970s? What happened were the first fateful steps as contributor Karen Irvine remarks—where algorithms make deci- toward the privatization of government” (37). sions that shape the world in which we live. Karin Knorr Cetina, an Austrian sociologist at the University of Forgoing the spectacle of the trading floor that Thomas Struth Chicago, and German sociologist Dirk Baecker continue their col- and Andreas Gursky depicted in the 1990s, Geissler and Sann, league’s tour of the markets, adding definitions and guiding the working as a study group or investigative team, have chosen to reader through the complexities of information and finance tech- contextualize innocuous objects: desktops, computer screens, the nology, as they consider the implications of automated trading on empty trading floor, and empty interiors of foreclosed proper- social relations. Knorr Cetina develops the conceit of an under- ties. Geissler and Sann include a set of portraits they shot (shoot- ground of hidden operations, in response to Geissler and Sann’s er, 2000), which turn out to be the faces of shooters (we can’t photographs of racks of black screens, signifying the end of a see what they are doing) at the moment of a kill in a video game. scopic regime and the occlusion of human traders in what she These images and the foreclosed properties implicitly amplify calls a “post-social” knowledge society. Baecker, after an impres- questions the market photos raise about the lack of connection to sive critical tour of communications theories, history of science, human consequences resulting from the fluctuations of a volatile and other ideas from Michel de Montaigne to Jürgen Habermas market. The collaboration that results in Volatile Smile resembles and Bruno Latour, presents the possibility that a world structured the investigations of Trevor Paglen, who documents the evidence by the forms of automated high-frequency trading will produce an of other contemporary shadow regimes fueled on abstraction and individual who is capable of dealing with “a nervous ordering of resulting in violence. flows and switches that gain their profile from an idiosyncratic ex- Irvine, curator for the Museum of Contemporary Photography, ploitation of heterogeneity” (94). Chicago, explains the book’s title in her foreword as being a play on And while Baecker seems optimistic about how humans will ac- “volatility smile,” a term used to describe the pattern of a graphi- commodate this networked world, for Geissler and Sann the only cal shape emerging from the difference between the prices of op- humans present in this collection are the animated, even grimac- tions and their underlying stock. Brian Holmes, who has tracked the ing, but impenetrable faces of the shooters. The problematical social and political implications of globalization and neoliberalism meanings of these images—the glowing but empty rooms of the in his blog Continental Drift, takes a geographical and literary for- foreclosed properties, the banal clutter on the desktops and the ay into the current incarnations of the dismal science. In his essay rest—lie not on the surface but elsewhere. “Information’s Metropolis: Chicago and the New Nature of Global Finance,” he outlines the historical development of markets in a city JANINA CIEZADLO is an artist and writer living in Chicago. midway between the agricultural West and the East, and proceeds 40 afterimage 43.3

Journal

Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural CriticismUniversity of California Press

Published: Nov 1, 2015

There are no references for this article.