Finance and ruination: A symposium on critical finance, collapse and speculative futurity.
University of Applied Arts Vienna, 23 April 2026.

Colleagues at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures in Vienna are hosting a one-day symposium on the theme of finance and ruination.

This symposium explores the entanglements of critical finance, speculation, and collapse as temporal and ontological conditions of the present. Finance operates not only as an economic system but as a medium of subjectivity and an engine of futurity, producing new forms of value, risk, and governance. Yet financial speculation also embodies dynamics where collapse is not an exception but a mode of operation: a constitutive feature rather than a catastrophic aberration. Through two thematic panels and a keynote, the symposium brings together scholars working across media theory, anthropology, philosophy, and critical art practice to critically investigate how financial systems fabricate futures while simultaneously accelerating their dissolution. The symposium reframes collapse not as an event but as an internal condition of finance – an integral immanence within the financial mediation of time, and a fundamental component of contemporary political imaginaries and technocapitalist exits.