Suzanne Treister on Critical Futurism
Suzanne Treister on Critical Futurism
Suzanne Treister, a pioneering media artist, is featured in Tate Modern’s ambitious historical digital art exhibition, Electric Dreams. The legendary early Amiga intervener discusses her practice as a holistic critique of technology, exploring the tensions between technological potential and societal risks, in conversation with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony).
Peter Bauman: You’ve written about how your work engages with technology “to talk about the here and now, where we were at, where we were going and in doing so not forget where we’ve been, so history and literature and ideas and all these things would of course be incorporated into the new language to become a commentary both on the future and on the past.”
How does this approach align with contemporary emerging technologies—like AI and blockchain—and what role do you think art plays in connecting past, present and future within these new mediums?
Suzanne Treister: I said that in around 2005 in an essay where I was talking about my early computer video game works from 1991 to 1992. It was in response to hostility toward the idea of working with computers that I encountered when I set up an Amiga computer in my studio. It was to clarify that my artworks were not about to turn into computer-generated special effects. That statement could be applied equally to HEXEN 2.0 (2009–11), which I made twenty years later, except that with HEXEN 2.0 I took things a step further. I wanted to bring together a big picture history of how we got to where we were at that time with technology and society to enable audiences to discuss ideas for positive alternative futures through the use of a tarot deck.
HEXEN 2.0 included a diagrammatic history of computing leading up to AI, quantum computing and possible new technologies, like dream sharing. My new project, HEXEN 5.0—an update of HEXEN 2.0 that I am currently working on—explores a multitude of current and potentially future technologies, including blockchain, Earth System Engineering and quantum interplanetary communication.
I no longer primarily use the new technologies themselves in my work. I more or less stopped doing that in 2000, when the web became colonized by governments and corporations. I don't think it's necessary to use AI to talk about AI or to mint NFTs on the blockchain to talk about new distributed ledger systems or DAOs.
I prefer an external commentary using older technologies like drawing and watercolour that I have autonomy over and are not dependent on the technologies I might be examining.
Peter Bauman: Can you talk more about the choice to engage with older technologies to examine and critique “the here and now”?
Suzanne Treister: I'm not sure older technologies totally can. Engaging in technology doesn't mean having to use new technologies as a medium. Most art is partial. No art can be about everything and all art has a role to play in navigating our existence. However, I am an advocate of taking a holistic approach in general.
Peter Bauman: This holistic approach—such as in HEXEN 2.0 and now HEXEN 5.0—touches on technology, power and societal control. Given our proximity to the US election, how do you see the role of art in navigating or challenging the impact of technology and data on democratic processes and public opinion?
Suzanne Treister: Some artists might take a more directly activist approach but I am trying to take a shot at it and other issues in HEXEN 5.0, which has a card for Post-Truth. Here's what's written on it, within a visual structure derived from alchemical art:
21st Century Socio-Political World Of Spin, Enabled And Exponentialised By The Internet/Web 2.0, An Abundance Of Competing Truth Claims, Social Media Toxicity, Influencers, Divisive Algorithms, Opinion Masquerading As News Blurring The Line Between Fact And Opinion, Between Objectivity And Subjectivity
Misinformation • Disinformation • Fake news • Improbable Conspiracy theories • Rumour bombs
• Vulnerability • Manufactured controversy
Sociopolitically Dangerous Positive Cybernetic Feedback Loops Of Escalating Misinformation, Distrust, Skepticism, Confusion, Anxiety and Disorientation, leading to Negative Public Brainwashing, Re-Shaping of Public Perceptions, Advancing Political Agendas, Worsening Sociopolitical Divisions, Disincentivising Rational Discourse, Increasing Real-World Violence, Nationalisms and Xenophobia
Long-Term Solutions:
Investment in Critical Thinking And Media Literacy Education
And at the centre is this 1967 quote by Hannah Arendt:"Since the liar is free to fashion his 'facts' to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience, the chances are that he will be more persuasive than the truth teller."
Since your question and my answer, Trump won the US election. I'm not sure any art can directly alter the selfish and unintelligent characteristics of so many of the human race. I know some artists feel a powerless sense of futility right now. But all you can do is keep hoping and trying. I recently took part in a project called Future Ours in New York in response to the United Nations ‘Summit of the Future’ in September. One of my tarot works from HEXEN 5.0, describing the emerging field of spiritual ecology, was displayed at the UN and also on 300 bus shelters around the city, along with images by around twenty artist and activist groups from all over the world. These kinds of efforts at least feel positive.
The HEXEN 5.0 deck is going to be published in 2025 by a new publisher, cosmogenesis (who are also publishing a reprint of HEXEN 2.0 this year). It will be distributed both inside and outside the art world so I am hoping that it will inspire diverse groups and individuals to work with it and discuss ideas and projects for positive direct action.
Peter Bauman: How does your work reconcile the hope and potential of emerging technologies like AI and blockchain with the negative consequences you’ve highlighted?
Suzanne Treister: HEXEN 5.0 naturally has cards assessing the issues of AI, blockchain, crypto, DAOs, the singularity, big tech, etc. It also critically and historically explores new global developments in science, the ecosystem and climate crisis, recent and traditional fields of knowledge and spirituality, new branches of bio-socio-political theory, contemporary countercultural, futuristic movements, new directions in science-fiction, and proposed solutions for an ethical survival of the human race.
There are many developing technologies for renewable energy and food production, but it's the evolving new fields I have made cards for that inspire me with more hope for the future, fields like Nexus thinking, Earth System Science, Spiritual Ecology, Astrocognition, and some of the new countercultures of refusal and renewal, alongside new directions in science fiction like solarpunk and hopepunk, because the people involved in these fields are the people who might effectively direct, promote, and make use of these technologies in ways that restore the complex planetary systems of which we are a part.
Peter Bauman: Your work from Fictional Videogame Stills will be shown at Tate Modern’s Electric Dreams. The titles in this series—Not Enough Memory, Presume Virtual Breakdown, and No Message - Proceed—suggest a tension between utopian visions of technology and its inherent flaws. How do these themes resonate today as society increasingly relies on digital systems that aren’t always stable or transparent?
Suzanne Treister: Yes, the risks and fantasies suggested by those early 1990s manifestations of technology are real and accelerating faster than we might have imagined. The possibilities for disaster are ever-growing, as are hopes for improvements in, for example, medicine and renewable energy technologies, but as usual, it feels like walking a tightrope. There is a HEXEN 5.0 card called Web3/3.0 – Web 5/5.0 which looks into the future of the internet, to Web 5.0, which is billed as a more user-centric internet, where you control your data and online experience, promising greater transparency, creativity, and connectivity—the infusion of emotional intelligence into the internet, facilitated by cutting-edge technologies like blockchain, AI and deep learning. This all requires a lot more looking into before we all walk into it like sheep.
Peter Bauman: Your video game stills and HEXEN work spotlight various cascading ideas that came out of cybernetics and computation in the ‘50s and ‘60s, specifically the Macy Conferences. How do you view these early concepts of control, feedback and systems theory in relation to today’s digital landscape? What insights do they provide into our current relationship with technology and data?
Suzanne Treister: HEXEN 2.0 specifically investigated the participants of the Macy Conferences (1946–1953), which took place in the USA, and whose primary goal was to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind in the aftermath of WWII, answering a perceived need for a more controlled society. HEXEN 2.0 analyzed the legacy of cybernetics as embodied in Web 2.0 and systems of control, showing how Web 2.0 works as a societal controlling system.
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HEXEN 5.0 traces cybernetics' relevance to whole earth systems and the climate crisis, where the cybernetic self-regulating feedback loops of the planetary ecosystem, which we have sent out of whack, need to be re-regulated through an understanding of the workings of the global ecosystem.
This is embodied in the aims of Earth System Science and potentially in an even more holistic system that could incorporate traditional knowledges and a spiritual dimension. Climate engineering and other new technologies need to be based on these models within an ethical framework or they will cause even more damage to ourselves and the life of the planet.
Peter Bauman: How do you see your work itself rooted in cybernetic thought—and thus generative or systems-based?
Suzanne Treister: You could say that for the two HEXEN projects in the sense that they try to illuminate whole-ish systems in order to analyse and positively improve them. But in terms of cybernetics, it would mean thinking of my projects as self-regulating systems of control. I'm not sure I can see them that way, can you?
But the two HEXEN projects, which are supposed to be educational and interactive, are radically different from most of my other works, which often use narrative fictional constructs in a similar way to a novelist or science-fiction writer. Projects like Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky, HFT The Gardener, Survivor (F) and The Escapist (Black Hole Spacetime), where imagined characters generate bodies of artwork, are a kind of critical futurism.
Peter Bauman: These projects highlight the diversity of your media, from painting to digital tools. But the incorporation of the Amiga computer seemed to mark a significant shift in your work in the early ‘90s. You’ve written about how computers reduced the laboriousness of painting, but the digital world also seemed less authoritative and had challenges with output at scale. How did these advantages and early limitations shape your approach to digital art, and how do you think about these tradeoffs today when scale is less of an issue?
Suzanne Treister: That's kind of funny; yes, at the start, when I got involved in computers in 1991, no one thought of them as having any authority. They were kind of clunky sci-fi things that signalled possible doom in a sci-fi sense, like in the deep future. But there was no evolved Internet or World Wide Web that had any authority. Yet today some people are capable of believing everything they see or read online.
With my first video game stills made on a computer, the outputting technology available to me was so weak I had to photograph the screen and print the works as photos. That, however, did make me feel like the works had the authority of a photograph.
It looked like I had gone into a video game arcade and photographed the screen of a real game, when in fact my video game stills were entirely made up by me as critical commentaries on impending technologies of the future.
Today, as I said, I don't very often use digital technologies in the making of my work. My outputs of scale are mostly analogue, unless I am showing works on paper as prints or blowing up scan of them for installations.
Peter Bauman: Your Amiga and video game-inspired work was offering critical commentary on how these technologies were—and would—impact society. You suggested that interactive video games represent a paradigm where “narrativity and ‘reality’ was becoming fluid and mutable.” How do you see today’s digital platforms—like virtual reality or AI-driven simulations—continuing or complicating this shift in how we experience and interpret reality?
Suzanne Treister: Back then, in 1991, there was already virtual reality. I recently made drawings and a digital image of my memory of it because I couldn't find any reference to it online. Now in 2024 we have AI influencers and far more sophisticated virtual environments. There can be a seemingly blurry zone between so-called real life and simulated reality where some people become confused as to which is which. For everyone else, those technologies can often function either as a form of escape and/or anxiety for the future.
New technologies always seem to provoke anxiety and refusal, but ideally those are the people who could take action, learn about and develop those technologies in positive directions, rather than remaining mute onlookers or consumers of what global corporations and governments want us to be and do.
Peter Bauman: Speaking of technology as a means to challenge global institutions of control, your Post-Surveillance Art series navigates themes of data, privacy and societal compliance in a post-Snowden era. These topics seem only more relevant today when our relationship with AI forces us to grapple with the gravity of these issues. How can art confront the normalization of AI-driven surveillance and control?
Suzanne Treister: As is written in the Post-Truth card, the positive way forward is through global investment in critical thinking and media literacy education, starting from an early age at schools and accessible to the general public through education programs in community centres, libraries and other institutions. Any way art can assist in that kind of mental awakening is useful. I guess that's what I'm trying to do by getting my tarot decks out in the wider world.
I've recently been doing some readings with groups of students and visitors to my studio and had some interesting results, where the suggested answer to a better future included: Women running the world; going back to the 1957–1986 period of computers and rethinking a new direction from there; and going back to the period of the early Islamic invention of the Astrolabe and starting again from there.
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HEXEN 2.0 Tarot reprint will be released November 26, 2024, followed by HEXEN 5.0 Tarot in March 2025, published by cosmogenesis.
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Suzanne Treister is a multimedia artist who worked as a painter before exploring emerging technologies from the early 1990s. She has been exhibited at solo and group shows around the world, including ZKM, the V&A, ICA, Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern.
Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's Editor-in-Chief.