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Volatile Smile By Beate Geissler, Oliver Sann, and Brian Holmes Verlag fur moderne Kunst Nürnburg, 2014 180 pp. (sb)/$45.00 (hb)
It is hard to reconcile the many complex and ultimately serious ideas in Volatile Smile with the austerity of the photographs. Their unsettling evidence points to a surface that is emptied because meaning lies elsewhere. In order to understand the technological substrata-in many ways this is a book of photographs about what we can't see-that keep the volatile, automated financial markets running, photographers Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, professors at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago respectively, have collaborated with writers whose investigations 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 act on their own without human execution and monitoring" (16), as contributor Karen Irvine remarks-where algorithms make decisions that shape the world in which we live.
Forgoing the spectacle of the trading floor that Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky depicted in the 1990s, Geissler and Sann, working as a study group or investigative team, have chosen to contextualize innocuous objects: desktops, computer screens, the empty trading floor, and empty interiors of foreclosed properties. Geissler and Sann include a set of portraits they shot (shooter, 2000),...