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Suzanne
Treister
- bio/info
Suzanne
Treister was born in London and studied at St Martin's and Chelsea Schools
of Art.
Treister
has lived in Australia, New York and Berlin and is currently based in
London.
Primarily a painter through the 1980s, Treister was a pioneer in the digital/new
media/web based field from the beginning of the 1990s, developing fictional
worlds and international collaborative organisations.
Currently
using various media including video, the internet, interactive technologies,
photography, drawing and painting, Treister's
practice deals with notions of identity, history, power and the hallucinatory.
Her constructions, described by Art in America as 'One of the most sustained
fantasy trips of contemporary art', belie a deeper mission: to explore
how we make sense of history and the politics of war.
Website: http://www.ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/
Treister
has shown nationally and internationally since 1981 and is a founder member
of three collaborative groups, NIH, PI and ICOLS.
Recent
exhibitions and events: HEXEN2039 at CHELSEA space, Warburg Institute,
Ognisko Polskie, Science Museum, British Museum, Dana Centre , London;
Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne; Skolská 28, Prague; Künstlerhaus
Bethanien, Berlin; New Art Gallery Walsall; City Lights, San Francisco
and www.hexen2039.net.
Annely Juda Fine Art, London; Tate Britain, London; Basekamp, Philadelphia,
USA; FILE RIO festival internacional de linguagem eletrônica, Brazil.
'Operation
Swanlake' at Annely Juda Fine Art, London; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin;
Gallery Skuc, Ljubljana; Magazin4, Vorarlberger Kunstverein, Bregenz;
and Œ(The World May Be) Fantastic¹, 2002 Biennale of Sydney; ŒDon't Call
it Performance¹, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Madrid and El Museo del Barrio,
New York, USA; the Moscow International Film Festival and File, Brazil.
Suzanne
Treister is represented by Annely Juda Fine Art, London
Works/articles
in recent publications include:
'Modern Art: A Critical Introduction' (2nd edition), Pam Meecham & Julie
Sheldon, Routledge London and New York 2005;
'Videogames and Art' Ed. Andy Clarke, Grethe Mitchell, Pub. Intellect
Books UK and University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Download
pdf essay: 'From Fictional Video Games to Time Travelling with Rosalind
Brodsky
Recent
monographs include:
'No Other Symptoms - Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky' CD ROM with
124 page colour hardback book. Published by Black Dog Publishing, London
1999.
'Hexen 2039 - new military-occult technologies for psychological warfare',
Black Dog Publishing,
London 2006.
***
Treister
is currently working on the following projects:
Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky
Since 1995 Suzanne Treister has been developing the project, Time
Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky. Brodsky, her heteronymic identity,
with whom she shares similar Anglo/Eastern European/Jewish roots,
is a delusional time traveller working at an imaginary 'controversial'
Government Research Institute in London, the 'Institute of Militronics
and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI)'. Time Travelling with
Rosalind Brodsky charts her life and adventures as she travels through
time and history, through fact and delusion: attempting to rescue
her grandparents from the camps of the Second World War, constructing
a laboratory in Mad King Ludwig's castle, and visiting the Russian
Revolution and the swinging 60s. She receives analysis from Freud,
Jung and Kristeva, hosts her own cookery show and sings in her own
band. Recent
works, eg. 'Hexen 2039', 'Golem/Loew-Artificial Life' and 'Operation
Swanlake' have been presented as 'Time Travel Research Projects' from
Brodsky's host institute, IMATI. (see below
)
Notes
- on IMATI Time Travel Research Projects
Time
Travel Research Project: Golem/Loew - Artificial Life
A Golem, an artificial man made out of clay, was created in 16th century
Prague by Rabbi Yehuda Loew (1520 -1609). Tracing the descendants
of the Loew dynasty alongside manifestations of the Golem name/legend
through history to the present day and into the future, the intention
of this project is to test whether an ability and/or desire to create
artificial life is a function carried in the DNA. This project takes
us on research trips to Prague, to the Loew's Cineplex and Hotel chains
of the US, to German Robotics companies, to perfumeries in Madrid
and a film distribution company in Italy. It engages with numerology
and occult role playing games on the internet.
Time
Travel Research Project: Operation Swanlake
Utilising the harnessed energy of a black hole located in the constellation
Cygnus (the Swan) Operation Swan Lake began in 2028 as an attempt
to develop a language capable of communicating with the universe.
Hypothesising a connection, substantiated through alchemical research,
sonic components were developed using retrieved recordings of swans
from specific historical periods and global locations and from first
performances of Wagner's Lohengrin at the Hoftheatre, Weimar in 1850
and Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake in 1895 at the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg.
Renamed
the Kirov Theatre in 1935, after Sergei Kirov, the murdered rival
of Stalin, the name was also given to a series of Soviet missile cruisers.
In 2028 the last of these ships, the Pyotr Velikiy Kirov Class Project
1144.2 Heavy Missile Cruiser, was decommissioned and purchased by
IMATI as spare parts for the sonic missile Swan Lake which in 2029
was constructed at Cape Canaveral, Florida. In November of the same
year Swan Lake transmitted a series of complex audio frequencies into
outer space.
Time
Travel Research Project: Hexen 2039
HEXEN 2039 charts Brodsky¹s para scientific research towards
the development of new mind control technologies for the British Military
through a series of drawings and diagrams, a video, website and site-specific
interventions. This complex body of work uncovers links between conspiracy
theories, occult groups, Chernobyl, witchcraft, the US film industry,
British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing, behaviour control
experiments of the US Army and recent practices of its Civil Affairs
and Psychological Operations Command (PSYOP) and new research in contemporary
neuroscience. The
results of HEXEN 2039 are utilised by the British Ministry of Defense
(MoD) in the development and delivery of a range of non lethal weapons
between 2040 and 2045.
HEXEN
II,
the sequel, is in development.
International
Corporation of Lost Structures (ICOLS)
In 2000 Treister founded the International Corporation of Lost Structures
(ICOLS). ICOLS is an artist driven, international cross cultural collaborative
organisation whose 60 members/contributors include artists, writers,
film makers, scientists, poets, anthropologists, theorists, activists
and art historians.
ICOLS
is intended to be a creative international space which utilises as
a structural device the dominant contemporary model of the corporate
structure. Within this structure the departmental titles; Department
of Global Disenchantment, Department of Revolutionary Nostalgia, Department
of Future Projections, Local Unit of Missing Links, Department of
Global Nostalgia, International Department of Local Aesthetics, Department
of Dislocated Memory, create contexts for analyses of history, the
present and projections for the future.
Each
ICOLS member chooses a job in one of the above Departmental Offices
from which to work on projects and become involved in collaborative
operations.
Since
2004 the latest ICOLS project, the ICOLS Strategy Defense and Arms
Fair has been touring to: Silja ferry, Baltic sea; the University
of South Florida; Columbia University, NY; CCA, Glasgow and The Performance
Space, Sydney.
ICOLS live events, publications and projects are archived at http://www.icols.org
NATO
NATO's codification system allows it to describe and classify large
parts of the world around us. Items as diverse as perfume, battleships,
animals, electronic equipment and musical instruments are ordered
and represented in a way that make them comprehensible and accessible
to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation so that they can be articulated
and used by the Military.
Within
the codification system the NATO Supply Classification (NSC) uses
a four-digit coding structure. The first two digits of the code number
identify the Group, eg. Group 77 - Musical Instruments, Phonographs,
and Home-Type Radios, whilst the last two digits of the code number
identify the Classes within the Group, eg. 7710 - Musical Instruments
(complete).
Since
2004 I have been working with these 4 digit NATO Supply Classifications
to develop an encyclopedic series of watercolours.
The project references the Western fine art representative tradition
as a systematic ordering and understanding of the world, with attendant
intentions and subtexts; the memento mori, ideas of ownership and
knowledge. Specifically referenced is the history of watercolours
as a scientific illustrative tool. By conjuring these histories and
narratives of representational painting within the taxonomies of the
military, the work problematises them and brings them into the matrix
of unease that constitutes our understanding of the world today: and
which indeed may be an outcome of these. The most innocuous objects
can be articulated by, or are invested with, the possibilities of
agency.
An
online guide to the NATO Codification System can be found at: http://www.nato.int/structur/AC/135/ncs_guide/english/e_index.htm
ALCHEMY
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 transformation
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.
http://www.ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/ALCHEMY/ALCHEMY.html
Other
projects are in development.
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