Subsecond Flocks — When you startle awake at four in the morning it’s not because you’re feeling happy, 2016

Financial markets and more specifically the practice of high frequency trading are the subject of the works Femke Herregraven presents in the context of Artefact. In her work, she gives these ultrafast financial transactions of computational trading a material form and physical presence.
Subsecond Flocks explores extreme ultrafast financial events in which algorithms execute rituals, triggered by human emotions on social network sites. As such, a hoax tweet on the hacked Associated Press account mentioning 'Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured' triggered a gigantic ‘crash’. In less than 2 minutes time, $135,8 billion was wiped of the market. With her work, Femke Herregraven attempts to grasp these events in a material and physical way by creating fictional financial artefacts. The artefacts consists of an interconnected system of elements in a closed of space representing a machine ecology/ecosystem. They function as material evidence of the subsecond symbiose between human panic and automated mathematical rituals.

Femke Herregraven (NL)
°1982, Nijmegen

The multimedia practice of Femke Herregraven is based on the friction between the material and the digital. As an artist, she is interested in power structures and the relations between financial markets, international law, geopolitical structures and climate change. She explores the geopolitical infrastructures and power relations. Herregraven confronts the viewer with controversial political and economical narratives. Through games, videos, prints, drawings, installations and sculptures she addresses thematics like international tax evasion in a playful and airy way. Femke Herregraven lives and works in Amsterdam. She is represented by Future Gallery, and is currently preparing a solo exhibition at Future Gallery in Berlin.