TATE ETC. What’s the best book that you’ve read lately?
SUZANNE TREISTER I recently read The Maniac (2023) by Benjamín Labatut, which describes the life and work of polymath John von Neumann, who also features as the Death tarot card in my project HEXEN 2.0 2009–11. He is described in the book through imagined perspectives of his family, friends and colleagues, revealing Neumann’s maniacal drive to put scientific advancement before the safety of the planet. For the past six months I’ve been on a residency in Paris, and what’s really excited me here are bandes dessinées (graphic novels). The bookshops are full of them. I’ve enjoyed Mathieu Bablet’s Carbone & Silicium (2020), a story of two empathetic AI androids who witness humanity’s destruction of the planet. What would John von Neumann have made of that?
ETC. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learnt recently?
ST Making my latest work, HEXEN 5.0 2023–4, which includes a new tarot deck, has involved two years of research into the 78 subjects of the cards. Through that research, I’ve learnt that there are a lot more people, organisations and technologies out there trying to restore the planet than I had previously imagined. I also discovered new fields, like spiritual ecology, astrocognition and nexus thinking. I briefly thought I’d figured out a new one – that the best way to restore the ecosystem of the planet was through developing an even more holistic and convergent field of study of cybernetic ecosystems, in which the Earth is conceived of as a single, living system in order for us to understand how to safely re-regulate it – until I found this approach already existed and is called earth system science. Although ESS still lacks a spiritual dimension.
ETC. What item of clothing, or accessory, could you not live without?
ST It has to be my sunglasses. I started wearing them almost full time when I lived in Australia in the 1990s, because of the high UV. After that, until around 2014, I lived in Berlin and London and was making work about government and military programmes. This coincided with the development of Web 2.0 and data surveillance, and I felt more comfortable with an incognito look. And for the past 15 years I’ve spent about a third of each year hiking in mountains and wear them day to day.
ETC. What would be your dream job if you weren’t an artist?
ST I said in a recent interview that if I was 18 now, and choosing a path in life, I would maybe not be thinking about becoming an artist. Faced with a world in decay, would I find the idea of becoming an artist as radical a proposition now as I did back in 1976 when I was 18? I think I’d perhaps be trying to establish a spiritual earth system science movement.
ETC. Where is your favourite place to contemplate the future?
ST The French Pyrenees.
TATE MODERN
Suzanne Treister is an artist who lives in London. A selection of her Fictional Videogame Stills is included in Electric Dreams, Tate Modern until 1 June 2025. Treister has made two limited-edition artworks from HEXEN 5.0, 2024 especially for Tate. See shop.tate.org.uk/limited-editions for more details. The re-released HEXEN 2.0 Tarot is available through cosmogenesis.world.
Electric Dreams is presented in the Eyal Ofer Galleries. In Partnership with Gucci. Supported by Anthropic. With additional support from The Electric Dreams Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate Americas Foundation, Tate International Council and Tate Patrons. Research supported by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor. The media partner is The Times and The Sunday Times.