COUNTERING CAPITULATION: From Automated Participation to Renegade Solidarity engages with the inquiries that followed the Flash Crash of May 6, 2010, the biggest one-day market decline in financial history. Based on a remarkable forensic analysis that contradicted the official findings of the regulatory authorities, Nestler argues that in the current legal framework evidence of market events can only be produced by a counter-provocation—the double figure of the expert witness emerges when the forensic analyst is joined by an inside source.

With the ambivalent, contingent, and marginal figure of the renegade—simultaneously a traitor and an educator—at its heart, COUNTERING CAPITULATION proposes a multilayered, transdisciplinary artistic practice engaged in creating narrative instabilities that coagulate dissent into insurrection. This is initiated by a reading of aesthetics as an “aesthetics of resolution”—which encompasses the entire semantic field of the term and its philosophical, scientific, technological, legal, social, artistic, and political meanings—and aims at moving towards its poietics, that is, from perception to action.

The video concludes with a call for “renegade solidarity” to counter the excess of (automated) evaluation and decision-making schemes, not only as regards finance but also proprietary black-box regimes in general.

Flash Crash charts and animations: Nanex LLC

Animation: Sylvia Eckermann

Sound editing: Szely

Synthetic algorithm voice over: Alva & Tom