Hexen 2039 : new military-occult technologies for psychological warfare : a Rosalind Brodsky research programme

by Suzanne Treister

Paper Book, 2006

Status

Available

Call number

709.04075

Genres

Art & Design

Nonfiction

Collection

Don

Publication

London : Black Dog Publishing, c2006.

Description

Rosalind Brodsky, the alter ego of artist Suzanne Treister, is a delusional time traveller who believes herself to be working at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality in the twenty-first century. HEXEN 2039 charts Brodsky's scientific research in the development of new mind control technologies through a series of drawings, diagrams and photographs. By turns baroque, challenging, comic, elegant, mysterious and intriguing, these works uncover or construct links between conspiracy theories, occult groups, Chernobyl, witchcraft, the US film industry, British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing, and behaviour control experiments of the US Army and its Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (PSYOP), in light of alarming new research in contemporary neuroscience. In addition, an essay by Richard Grayson examines Treister's practice in detail. As a whole, this fascinating and complex body of work questions the way we look at history and the future, science, technology, politics, and narrative. A rich and engaging book, HEXEN 2039 is part artist's monograph and part chilling premonition of the future, echoing the world of graphic novels and computer games. The book also includes a 62 x 53 cm poster.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member misteraitch

A very curious volume of drawings, texts and photographs published to coincide with an exhibition first staged in 2006, which in turn could be said to form part of a larger, ongoing artwork concerning Treister’s ‘fictional alter ego Rosalind Brodsky, a delusional time traveller who believes herself

to be working at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI) in the twenty-first century.’

To quote further from the blurb: ‘HEXEN2039 charts Brodsky's scientific research towards the development of new mind control technologies for the British Military. This work uncovers or constructs 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),’

The book falls into four main sections: a series of meticulous graphite drawings; a sequence of crude sketches, supposedly tracing images as glimpsed by Treister / Brodsky in John Dee’s scrying crystal; a set of exercises in gematria; and a number of elaborate diagrams cast in the form of alchemical diagrams.

Some of the elements in the book, viewed in isolation, are not particularly effective, but the work’s cumulative effect is a distinctly strange one, and the book positively hums with weirdness.

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LibraryThing member Cinq-Mars

This work belongs to a particular and perhaps unarticulated genre of artistic fictions that includes such things as the Codex Seraphinianus, Lionni's Parallel Botany, Xu Bing's 天書 works and, perhaps an early example, the Voynich manuscript. The impact of such a project is more in the ensemble,

the assemblage, than in any particular item within it. Some, like this one, include text that partakes of the created world; others contain no effective text, but merely present images, including images of what might be text but cannot be read. At their best these may be jeux d'esprit, but not jests. In their evident earnestness they hover in a space that they create between delusion, deception, and provocation; like alien manifestations over our familiar cities, they appear through gaps in the clouds of the everyday, and we are shocked from the routine dismissals of the familiar into renewed wonder.

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