The photographs of Geissler & Sann present two sets of raw facts. On the one hand we see a series of decaying Chicago interiors. On the other we are confronted by a sequence of keyboards and blank screens: the empty desks of a high-frequency trading establishment. Placed before them, as a kind of epigraph, is the portrait of a young man. He is an
electronic gamer, a so-called »first person shooter«, whose smile has been frozen at the instant of the virtual kill. How shall we understand his relation to the real estate, on the one hand, and to the high-speed trading machines, on the other? Can we grasp the enigma of the gamer’s
volatile smile? The artist couple Geissler & Sann have been working on topics relating to cybernetics and virtual, electronic communications for more than a decade. Interested in the impact of technology on global systems of commerce and links between computer games and electronic trading, Geissler & Sann use photography to explore virtual communications and the effects of technology on human behavior and society at large. Part art monograph and part scholarly textbook, this volume is the culmination of their research on those topics.