The economic power of global finance now rivals the sovereignty of nation states. At the same time, automated global finance increasingly trades beneath the threshold of human perception. How do cultural practices and artistic vocabularies narrate the interscalar implications of financial sovereignty? And how can these planetary scales and inhuman speeds be visualised and mapped? These questions can be focused on the emergent phenomena of the flash crash. Since 2010, proprietary algorithms, acting outside the control of human traders, have regularly threatened and resurrected financial markets by trading billions of dollars at near light speed. The lecture examines the differing modes of forensic and fictional narrations occasioned by these ultrafast extreme events and speculates upon what forms narrative practice might take in a present increasingly dominated by predatory computational ecologies.

Kodwo Eshun is an artist and theorist based in London. He is co-founder of The Otolith Group whose recent works have been presented in solo exhibitions at Serralves, Porto and Bergen Kunsthall and group exhibitions such as The Anthropocene Project. A Report, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Cut to Swipe, Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2010, The Otolith Group was nominated for The Turner Prize. Eshun is the author of Dan Graham: Rock My Religion (2012) and More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998). He is coeditor of World 3 (2014), The Militant Image: A Cine-Geography: Third Text 108 (2011), Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? (2009), A Long Time Between Suns (2009) and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective (2007). Eshun is a Lecturer in Aural and Visual Cultures at the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London, and Visiting Professor for Theory Fiction at HEAD Geneva. 

Navigating Turbulences names the Public Seminar 2016/17 that is organised by the Research-Based CCC Master Program, one of three Masters of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD – Genève. More a frame than a theme,
Navigating Turbulences proposes to continue to think together about the need for new vocabularies for living in global turbulences by means of contemporary research processes. All sessions emerge from the CCC-Curriculum with its faculty members The Colloquium departs from literally “a speaking together”: from com- “together” + -loquium “speaking”. Such an approach does not propose thinking to be a philosophical method to study a subject matter but departs from a moment under conditions of turbulence when knowledge is in crisis that makes it necessary for us to think, to think differently.