A hybrid of a digital witch’s desk, an altar and a financial trader’s workstation creates the space to interrogate the agency of calculative infrastructures, by engaging with the (ir)rationality of financial predictions.

Taking the example of the deep-sea mining market, the work displays the process how mathematical abstractions generate meaningful signals and belief systems, that create powerful imaginaries with political and material effects.
It traces the capital flows into the new economic frontier of the deep ocean, and the revenue forecast for its extraction.

In focus are millennia-old rocks at the seafloor, which are deemed the largest reserves of critical metals to secure the infrastructural conditions of algorithmic capitalism. To trouble extractive regimes based on the numerical warfare of capital accumulation, digital witchcraft is practiced.

A speculative scenario mimics the intra-active configuration of the computational with the fictitious and the infrastructural to bewitch its relational functionality. Price signals of deep-sea investments are jinxed and spells glitch the code of financial models to intervene in the alchemical powers of capital in digital reality.