The Process: What Is Financial Astrology?
Alanna Chance / Somerset House (UK 2022)
29 min Episode 2 of 6
We’re used to experiencing the work of an artist in its final form – in the gallery, on the stage, or mixed on an album. But what has been the journey to get there? Somerset Housemersethouse.org.uk/ is home to a community of over 70 artists and makers.
This series goes behind the scenes of the process that some of these artists go through to get to the finished work.
Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist interested in exploring the chimeric edges of global systems. Recently his research has taken him into the world of finance, where he’s been drawn to the sorts of speculative ways of thinking we might normally associate with the occult. Enter Financial Astrology, a way of forecasting the markets based on the positions of the cosmos. In this episode of The Process, Gary goes down the rabbit hole to try to understand this field and grasp why cryptocurrency in particular is so obsessed with the stars. He hears about some seismic events on the horizon from Christeen Skinner, a financial astrologist who has been working in the City of London for over 20 years and talks to social anthropologist and former equity fund manager, Philip Grant about how ideas of magic and finance overlap.