Arts at CERN Gives Collide Award to Creator of Tarot Cards ‘Hexen 2.0’, Suzanne Treister

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest supercollider in the world. The laboratory’s stated purpose is to perform high-energy particle physics.

Every year CERN elects new artists to create pieces that interpret their research. The Collide International Award is a three-month residency program. The program runs in collaboration with the UK’s Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) which fully funds a two months stay at CERN and an additional month at FACT headquarters in Liverpool.

This year CERN’s Collide winner was Suzanne Treister. Her projects reinterpret given taxonomies and histories to examine the existence of covert, unseen forces at work in the world, whether corporate, military or paranormal.

In 1995 she created an alter ego, Rosalind Brodsky, a time-traveling researcher from the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality.

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Treister’s novel “Hexen 2039 charts Brodsky’s scientific research towards the development of new mind control technologies for the British Military, through a kaleidoscopic series of drawings, diagrams and photographs which are 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.”

Since winning the Collide Award, she has been commissioned by CERN to create artwork related to the “holographic universe.”

The holographic universe was an idea first suggested in the 1990s, and is one where all the information that makes up our 3-D ‘reality’ (plus time) is contained in a 2-D surface on its boundaries.

Professor Kostas Skenderis of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Southampton explains: “Imagine that everything you see, feel and hear in three dimensions (and your perception of time) in fact emanates from a flat two-dimensional field. The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional surface, such as in the hologram on a credit card. However, this time, the entire universe is encoded.”

Michael Coleman Talbot penned Mysticism and the New Physics and The Holographic Universe in which he expanded on the parallels between ancient mysticism and quantum mechanics. Through studying the research of David Bohm and Karl H. Pibram, he came to believe that telepathy, precognition, mystical feelings of oneness with the universe, and even psychokinesis, or the ability of the mind to move physical objects without anyone touching them are a product of this holographic model of reality. The holographic model of the universe has been embraced by an increasing number of scientists.

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In her most recent work, Treister developed HEXEN 2.0, a “historical profile compiled in a deck of tarot cards of post World War II federal scientific research programs of mass control and the counterculture of grassroots resistance.”

“Based on actual events, people, histories and scientific projections of the future, and consisting of alchemical diagrams, a Tarot deck, photo-text works, a video and a website, HEXEN 2.0 offers a space where one may use the works as a tool to envision possible alternative futures.”

Treister’s tarot deck is full of what most deem conspiracy. For instance, the ‘Justice’ card says, “one world government” with a quote from Bertrand Russell from Scientific Outlook. “These considerations prove that a scientific world society cannot be stable unless there is a world government…thus whatever outward forms there may be, all real power will come to be concentrated in the hands of those who understand the art of scientific manipulation,” it reads in part.

In an unquoted part of the Scientific Outlook Bertrand says, “unless there is a world government which secures universal birth control, there must from time to time be great wars, in which the penalty of defeat is widespread death by starvation.”

Treister’s ‘Wheel of Fortune’ card delves into cybernetics. The ‘Five of Chalices’ card quotes H.P. Lovecraft, an open occultist. ‘Two of Pentacles’ shows the ‘intercloud,’ a bomb and ‘global data.’ Another card shows LSD, yet another MK Ultra. You get the picture, these aren’t your everyday forms of art.

This leads us to pose the question, why would CERN elect such an artist?