catchafallingknife.com

agnc

 

Michael Goldberg’s artwork catchafallingknife.com is about stockmarket prediction. Goldberg performed this work within an installation at Artspace which was accessible to the public. He was both a sharetrader and performance artist. He started off with $50 000 and each day tracked the amount of money he lost and won on the stockmarket. In a related work made in 2008 called Remote Predictive Viewing, Goldberg attempted a psychic and precognitive divination of the stock market during the week of the commemoration of 9/11, when global markets are highly volatile. The methodology of Remote Predictive Viewing (RVP) was taken directly from CIA’s cold war experiments in RVP, in which psychic abilities were used to predicted specific operatives. Although discontinued by the CIA, this method has been used since to predict stock market movements. Goldberg worked with a group of participants who made drawings in response to company logos, which were then mapped onto MOMA images e.g. René Magritteʼs False Mirror. Goldberg explains the connection between these two artworks exploring prediction: “As with catchingafallingknife.com, the real value of the project would emerge in the form of interrogations from the dark recesses of its implausibilities, not from the spectacle of successfully meeting its expectations.”

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