Hillel Fischer Traumberg (b. 1982 London), a high frequency algorithmic trader in the city of London, experienced a semi-hallucinogenic state one day whilst staring fixedly at the High Frequency Trading graph patterns illuminating the bank's trading room walls. After several such experiences Traumberg got the idea of experimenting with psychoactive drugs and eventually managed to procure some online from a supplier in Zurich.

The influence of the drugs, which he took at first in small doses, began to alter Traumberg's perceptions of the trading algorithms he was working with and he gradually began to feel more at one with them as if he actually inhabited the code. He felt himself becoming part of an infinite swirl of global data as the algorithms became transformed in his mind into technicolour fluxing entities, travelling through and beyond his body in holographic space and time.

In his spare moments Traumberg started researching the ethnopharmacology of a hundred or so known and documented psychoactive plants across the world, exploring their historical ritual uses and functions in shamanic healing, in magic, religion, sex, divination, protection, modern medicine and in mental enhancement.

He became curious about their chemical composition and studied the compounds in each plant which produce the psychoactive effects. He made lists of the active substances, the alkaloids, and wondered whether inserting their molecular formulae into the codes of his trading algorithms would have a similar effect as the drugs themselves have on the human brain, i.e. whether they would in any way enhance or alter the trading performance of the algorithms.

Inevitably when the presence of these rogue algorithms came to light at the bank his bosses traced the problems back to Traumberg. Suspecting a nervous breakdown due to the stresses of the job they released him from his employment. With his substantial savings Traumberg moved to a penthouse apartment on the other side of town at Embassy Gardens, a New York Meatpacking District styled riverside complex recently constructed around the new U.S. Embassy in Nine Elms on the southside of the Thames.

From his apartment Traumberg had a 360 degree view which took in the US Embassy, the New Covent Garden Flower Market, the green glass edifice of the MI6 building just beyond St George Wharf, the Houses of Parliament and the city of London further to the east.

Most mornings Traumberg went for a stroll around his new neighbourhood.

From the local flower market he built up a collection of plants with supposed psychoactive properties which soon filled his living room shelves and penthouse roof garden.

One day, staring at the list he had compiled of the botanical names of his plants he decided to conduct a gematria experiment. Using his rudimentary knowledge of the Hebrew language, gained during his school days, Traumberg made numerical experiments translating the botanical names of psychoactive plants into phonetic Hebrew and then deriving their numerical equivalents.

He discovered that, for example, Mandrake, (Mandragora officinarum) had a gematria value of 970. Adding together the 9 the 7 and the 0 made 16 and then adding the 1 and the 6 made 7.

A copy of the Financial Times on his desk prompted him one day to check the numerical equivalents of the plants against the top companies in the FT Global 500 index.

Traumberg found that the two final numbers for Mandrake, 16 and 7, corresponded to Petro China and Wells Fargo which came 16th and 7th respectively in the FT index.

Traumberg compiled a gematria chart of all the plants, listing their botanical names alongside their global companies equivalents. He then developed an algorithm that would trawl the internet collecting images of the groups of psychoactive plants which corresponded to each company.

Inspired by the botanical illustrations of Ernst Haeckel, which he had loved as a child, Traumberg reprogrammed the algorithm to collate and transform these images into works with a similar style and format.

Stimulated by the artistic results he recalled a summer holiday he'd taken in 2013 to Venice with some banker friends. One of them, an avid art collector, had dragged them around an exhibition in a park on the lagoon and he had seen masses of weird coloured drawings in one of the many buildings, which were said to have been made by artists who had received no formal training.

This brought to mind a work trip several years previously, to UBS in Bern, Switzerland. The Swiss bank had taken them on a free afternoon to a museum where he had seen works by a supposed madman. He looked it up online, the guy was called Adolf Wölfli.

Traumberg, who by now had become obsessed with the forms and structures of the plants themselves, as well as all the data he was collating about them, began, under the influence of the various psychoactive drugs in his possession, to spend his afternoons making a vast series of drawings.

Under the hypnotic influence of Wölfli he transformed himself into an 'outsider' artist. He developed a fantasy of himself as a kind of techno-shaman, transmuting the spirituality of the universe and the hallucinogenic nature of capital into new artforms.

One day a banker friend, the art collector from the Venice trip, paid him a social visit and was astonished to see Traumberg's new apartment filled with strange plants and drawings. On a subsequent visit he took along a top art dealer who invited Traumberg to show the works at his London gallery. Traumberg, in the throes of a hallucinogenic trip, agreed to the offer. Later in the year the dealer put on an exhibition and all the works were sold out, primarily to bankers, oligarchs and to some of the corporations featured in the works.

Traumberg was unaffected by this turn of events, his primary concern being to discover whether the realities opened up to him by psychoactive plants were arbitrary hallucinations or whether they indeed, as many had suggested, lifted the brain's filter, opening the portal to what lay beyond our everyday perceptions of reality necessary for survival; the holographic universe perhaps?

Traumberg spent his days wondering whether his experiences were real or imaginary, whether they originated in his unconscious or came from another dimension. He wondered about the nature of consciousness and whether it existed outside the brain/body. Was consciousness perhaps the ultimate organising principle of the universe, merely reflected by the brain in a limited and distorted way? Was consciousness maybe a giant algorithm? And where was the universe in this algorithm?

Based on his experience with high frequency trading algorithms Traumberg decided to develop a new algorithm to test these ideas.

A brain thinking about a brain. Consciousness thinking about consciousness. An algorithm trying to return information about another algorithm. A brain trying to develop an algorithm about an algorithm about a universe of which it is a part or perhaps a whole or perhaps neither?

HFT The Gardener
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High Frequency Trading (HFT)
Hillel Fischer Traumberg (HFT) (en. ToPraise Fisherman DreamMountain)

Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA)
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Selected works in the exhibition, Algorithmic Rubbish: Daring to Defy Misfortune
July 4 - Aug 23 2015

P.P.O.W., New York, USA
All works
Feb 11 – Mar 12 2016
• View photos of Installation
• View video of Installation

CCS Bard Hessel Museum
Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, USA
HFT/Botanical prints in the exhibition, Third Nature
May 8 – 29 2016
• View photos of Installation

Auto Italia, London
HFT/Botanical prints in the exhibition, Hailweed
June 11- July 24 2016
• View photos of Installation

Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin
HFT/Botanical prints in the exhibition, The Hellstrom Chronicle
July 1 – August 8 2016
• View photos of Installation

Liverpool Biennial 2016
All works
Venue: Exhibition Research Lab (ERL), John Lennon Building, John Moores University, Liverpool, England)
July 9 - Oct 16 2016
• View photos of Installation

Annely Juda Fine Art, London
All works
Sept 22 - Oct 29 2016
• View photos of Installation

Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV), Dortmund, Germany
Selected works in the exhibition The World Without Us
22 Oct 2016 – 5 March 2017
• View photos of Installation

Western Exhibitions, Chicago, USA
HFT/Diagrams in the exhibition Underlying system is not known
7 January - 18 February 2017

Koenig and Clinton, New York, USA
Selected works in the exhibition Trans-Subjective Engagements
Jan 21 – Feb 18 2017
• View photos of Installation

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany
Selected works in the exhibition Alien Matter, Transmediale 2017
3 Feb - 5 March 2017
• View photos of Installation

Tenderpixel, London, England
Selected works in the exhibition Tropical Hangover
(7 February - 4 March 2017)
• View photos of Installation

Photo Access, Canberra, Australia
(Selected works in the exhibition Planetary Gardening)
4-26 March 2017
• View photos of Installation

WRO Art Center, Wroclaw, Poland
Selected works in DRAFT SYSTEMS, WRO Biennale 2017
(17 May - 30 June 2017)
• View photos of Installation

Vžigalica Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Selected works in the exhibition The World Without Us
27 June - 31 August 2017
• View photo of Installation

Mali Salon, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, Croatia
Selected works in the exhibition The World Without Us
7-22 September 2017
• View photo of Installation

Maison de la Région, Strasbourg, France
Selected works in the exhibition 0100011111010100, Le numérique dans les collections des FRAC du Grand Est
6 - 24 November 2017

The Gallery, Arts University Bournemouth, England
Selected works in the exhibition Black Mirror
23 November 2017 – 1 February 2018
• View photos of Installation

Kunstpalais & Städtische Sammlung Erlangen, Germany
Selected works in the exhibition Altered States. Substances in Contemporary Art
3 March- 21 May 2018
• View photos of Installation

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), Barcelona, Spain
Selected works in the exhibiiton BLACK LIGHT: Hermetic Traditions in Contemporary Art Since the 1950s
May-October 2018
• View photos of Installation

FACT, Liverpool, England `
Selected works in the exhibition Broken Symmetries
22nd November 2018 – 3rd March 2019

Centre d'art contemporain d'Ivry - le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, France
Selected works in the exhibiiton, Des attentions
18 January – 31 March 2019
• View photos of Installation

Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, Wales
Selected works in the exhibition Phytopia
16 March – 26 May 2019

FMR LINZ 2019 Biennial, Donaulände, Linz, Austria
Selected works in public outdoor space
March 27-30 2019
• View photos of Installation

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), Barcelona, Spain
Selected works in the exhibition Quantica
9th April - 24th September 2019
Touring to iMAL, Brussels, Belgium January - May 2020; Le Lieue Unique, Nantes, France June - September 2020

Museum Centre del Carme, Valencia, Spain
Selected works in the exhibiiton, Zoextropy. The Posthuman Beauty
21 June – 22 Sept 2019
• View photos of Installation

Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila, Philippines
All works in the exhibition, What Lies Within: Centre of the Centre
5 September – 1 December 2019
• View photos of Installation

Museo Villa dei Cedri, Bellinzona, Switzerland
Selected works in the exhibition, Icone vegetali. Arte e botanica nel secolo XXI /Vegetal Icons. Art and botany in the 21st century
(18 March - 7 August 2022)