HEXEN 2.0 / Literature
16 March–12 May 2012
HEXEN 2.0 is the sequel to Suzanne Treister’s acclaimed 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.
HEXEN 2.0 delves deeper into the 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 diverse scientific and social sciences through the development of cybernetics, the history of the internet, the rise of Web 2.0 and mass intelligence gathering, and the implications for the future of new systems of societal manipulation towards a control society.
Based on actual events, people, histories and scientific projections of the future, HEXEN 2.0 takes us from hypothetical futures to an hypnotic, mesmerising space of early technological fantasy to hallucinate feedback from the past from where one may imagine and construct possible alternative futures.
From 7 March to 1 May 2012, the Science Museum will also premiere work from Treister’s HEXEN 2.0 as part of its new Arts Council of England funded art programme.
An 160 page full colour book illustrating the works comprising HEXEN 2.0 with an essay by Lars Bang Larsen, and a separately available working 78 card Tarot Deck will be published by Black Dog Publishing, London.
About the Artist
Suzanne Treister was a pioneer in the digital/new media/web based field from the beginning of the 1990s. Her practice, which also encompasses drawing, watercolour, video, installation and photography, engages with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research which she relies on to reveal the structures that bind power, identity and knowledge.
Suzanne Treister has exhibited recently at: Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany; D21 Kunstraum, Leipzig, Germany; P.P.O.W, New York, USA; Le Plateau Art Center, FRAC Paris, Ile de France; Museum of Contemporary Art Bordeaux (CAPC), France; Temporary Kunsthalle, Berlin, Germany; Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; Center for Contemporary Art, Torun, Poland; Annely Juda Fine Art, London; Alma Enterprises, London; Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV), Dortmund, Germany; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, USA; Shedhalle, Zurich, Switzerland.
Opening hours: 12–5.30pm, Wednesday–Saturday
(excluding public holidays)