RICHARD GRAYSON |
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Catalogue essay on the work of Suzanne Treister for the exhibition, WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age, Julia Stoschek Collection’s 15TH Anniversary Exhibition, JSC Düsseldorf, Germany, travelling to Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France, 2023 Published by JULIA STOSCHEK FOUNDATION, Berlin, Germany, 2023 Suzanne Treister, TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS – New Cosmological Models for Survival, 2020–ongoing. Suzanne Treister (b. 1958 in London; lives and works in London) came to prominence as a painter in the UK in the 1980s, exploring ways that collisions of images and text might generate new narratives and meaning. Linked to contemporary discussions of postmodernity, Treister’s paintings were notable for their engagement with European history, literature, and the narratives of twentieth-century Jewish diaspora, informed by her family background. In the late 1980s these concerns thrillingly collided with her growing interest in video games in paintings such as Video Game for Primo Levi (1989). In 1991 Treister bought an Amiga Computer, and in 1992 her exhibition at the Edward Totah Gallery in London showed computer generated photographs of screens from imaginary video games. Treister’s groundbreaking interactive computer work/game No Other Symptoms – Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky (1995–1999) was the result of her exploration of technologies more complex than the 0.5 meg computer. Made in 1995–99 and set in the Institute of MiIitronics and Advanced Time Interventionality of 2058, the viewer/player follows Treister’s alter ego Rosalind Brodsky across space and time in her quest to rescue her grandparents from the Holocaust. She visits different places, such as the Russian Revolution, 1960s London, and Martian settlements, and plays different roles, including the lead singer of a band and the star of a TV cooking show. A central question in the work is the degree to which Brodsky is delusional. In search of insight to her own state of mind she time-travels to psychoanalytic sessions with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva, all of which are documented in detailed case notes. The players’ search for keys to navigate the architecture of the game not only parallels Brodsky’s search for keys to her own psyche and reality but it entangles them in recursive paradoxes of digital/virtual worlds and consensus reality. In the work we read a journal entry by Freud questioning whether his encounter with Brodsky is itself delusional, if 'my experiments with hypnosis are beginning to effect my mind in an unforeseen manner' 1. This draws the player/viewer into an ontological vortex. If what we are experiencing is delusional, are we then a component part of that delusion? No Other Symptoms takes us into a long history of esoteric enquiry into relations and hierarchies of the material and non-material, the perceived and the perceiver. Post-Modern texts suggested that nothing might exist outside of language. Bishop Berkeley (born1865), an Idealist, stated that things could not exist outside being perceived by someone, everything was Mind Dependent, that the reason a table continued to be when someone was not in the room was that it existed in the mind of God. Idealism drew on the Platonic dualisms of the Gnostics, and the hierarchies of the real and ideal modelled in Plato's cave (428 b.c.e). No Other Symptoms extends this metaphysical interrogation into the realms of technology and virtuality. Treister started the project in 1995 the same year that the first consumer VR headsets became commercially available and four years after the first VR arcade games were launched. The helmets that Brodsky wears, and which seem to obscure her vision, echo Virtual Reality headsets. A description of Brodsky's institute reads, "The main function of IMATI is to develop virtual simulations of key moments in history. Researchers at the Institute then carry out simulated interventions/experiments within these virtual times/worlds"2. Presciently, the work extends the locus of subjectivity from the organic to the electronic, and suggests that delusion and hallucination will now emerge from the operations of technology as much as psychology, and that worlds and realities might exist in the digital realm as well in the minds of humans and Gods. That contemporary technologies might already have generated their own realities overlaying those of history, is underlined when Brodsky materialises on the film set of Schindler's List rather than the actual camp of her grandparents. Described as “one of the most sustained fantasy trips of contemporary art,” this work is an innovative exploration of ways that the emerging digital universe generates multiple new hallucinatory relationships between the real and the virtual. 3 Subsequent projects develop these approaches to generate dazzling mappings and meditations on history, technology and potentiality. The series TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS – New Cosmological Models for Survival (2020– ongoing) collides ideas from diverse fields including futurology, ecology, biosphere design, hypothesised sociologies, and crystal architectures to propose models of transformative consciousness and political organisation far beyond the limited logics of today's government and private space industries. Richard Grayson 1. https://www.suzannetreister.net/suzyWWW/biog/freud1.html
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