Suzanne Treister (London Saint Martin’s School of Art and Chelsea School of Art) lives between London and the French Pyrenees.
S. Treister’s first encounters with digital culture date back to the video-game arcades of Soho, London, in the late 1980s. The young painter was drawn to the physicality of the machines, the pop aesthetics of their computer-generated images, and the video-ludic imaginaries of war and violence that they transmitted. Fascinated by the possibilities offered by graphic editing tools, she acquired a personal computer in 1991. This encounter with what she deemed highly advanced equipment would forge a relationship to technology—full of fascination, projection, mysticism, and defiance—that infuses the entirety of her work.

Taking a holistic approach to her work on technology, S. Treister identifies a line of tension between its potential for society and its risks. The basis of her approach is a series of digital collages and fictitious screenshots, reproducing video game aesthetics and supplemented with text, in which a psychoanalytic perspective vies with futuristic projection or prophecy. Her singular entry into the world of new media perhaps stems from her early interest in psychoanalytic theory, in the Holocaust and Eastern Europe, and a taste for works of science fiction. She quickly understood the scope of the narrative possibilities offered by digital tools to escape linearity and navigate between dimensions and time-spaces: “narrativity and ‘reality’ became fluid and mutable,” she explains. In 1995, she created a website entitled Would you recognize a virtual paradise?, putting into practice this interactive, rhizomatic, and hypertextual vision of narrative. In real life, her alter ego Rosalind Brodsky (Time Traveling with Rosalind Brodsky, 1995–2006) is embodied in costume-sculptures that are augmented with various electronic components.

A child of her generation, S. Treister’s works are imbued with the utopian vision that accompanied the massification of computer tools in the mid-1990s. She discovered email while living in Australia; although captivated by the sense of proximity engendered by the tool, she remains critical of the Internet’s military origins. As governments and big business progressively monopolized science and technology and seized control of their developments, S. Treister downed her digital tools and returned to drawing.

Between 2009 and 2011, S. Treister created HEXEN 2.0, a series of diagrams and drawings that explore the history of cybernetics and its links with computer science, the Internet, the army, and counter-culture in order to demonstrate how Web 2.0 functions as a system of societal control. HEXEN 2.0 took the form of a tarot deck inspired by the Tarot de Marseille.

The artist’s series of graphic drawings HFT The Gardener (2014–2015) brings together esoteric translation, the cybernetics of consciousness, and the hallucinatory aesthetics that emanate from real-life circulations of power. Her fictional persona Hillel Fischer Traumberg, an algorithmic high-frequency trader (HFT), experiments with psychoactive drugs and explores the ethnopharmacology of over one hundred psychoactive plants.

S. Treister is convinced that we must make plans for the future As such, a recent series of drawings and diagrams, HEXEN 5.0 (2025), also in the form of a tarot deck, prolongs and updates HEXEN 2.0, notably by incorporating blockchain technology, Earth system science, and interplanetary quantum communications. Conceived as a tool for exchanging, learning, and imagining liveable futures, HEXEN 5.0 relies on the power of optimism and empathy in order to actively contribute to such alternatives to come.