there's our catastrophe

HEXEN 2.0 Suzanne Treister 2009-2011

HEXEN 2.0 looks into histories of scientific research behind government programmes of mass control, investigating parallel histories of countercultural and grass roots movements. HEXEN 2.0 charts, within a framework of post-WWII U.S. governmental and military imperatives, the coming together of scientific and social sciences through the development of cybernetics, the history of the internet, the rise of Web 2.0 and increased intelligence gathering, and implications for the future of new systems of societal manipulation towards a control society.

HEXEN 2.0 specifically investigates the participants of the seminal Macy Conferences (1946-1953), whose primary goal was to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind. The project simultaneously looks at diverse philosophical, literary and political responses to advances in technology including the claims of Anarcho-Primitivism and Post Leftism, Theodore Kaczynski/The Unabomber, Technogaianism and Transhumanism, and traces precursory ideas such as those of Thoreau, Warren, Heidegger and Adorno in relation to visions of utopic and dystopic futures from science-fiction literature and film.
Based on actual events, people, histories and scientific projections of the future, and consisting of alchemical diagrams, a Tarot deck, photo-text works, pencil drawings, a video and a website, HEXEN 2.0 offers a space where one may use the works as a tool to envision possible alternative futures.

HEXEN 2.0 is the sequel to HEXEN 2039 which imagined new technologies for psychological warfare through investigating links between the occult and the military in relation to histories of witchcraft, the US film industry, British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing and behaviour control experiments of the U.S. Army.

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Suzanne Treister

ALCHEMY 2007-8

A series of works which transcribe front pages of international daily newspapers into alchemical drawings, reframing the world as a place animated by strange forces, powers and belief systems. These works redeploy the languages and intentions of alchemy: the transmutation of materials and essences and the revealed understanding of the world as a text, as a realm of powers and correspondences which, if properly understood, will allow man to take on transformative power.

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htmlflowers:

these are some faceless witches i stick and poked onto my friend lauren’s arm! it took us heaps of different sessions cause we would cook a meal, start drinking a bottle of champagne, watch some stand up comedy or a sad movie, buy some wine or beer, become drunk, make out and fall asleep along the way each time. there are ten heads and we sat down to do it four times. it was cool though cause we hang out all the time anyways. we’d get to like the second head each time and we would be so drunk we’d just want to eat candy and watch stuff and cuddle. i love lauren.

another tattoo i did on lauren