Hexen 2.0: Suzanne Treister

2012 | Art, Photography & Fashion

HEXEN2.0 is the sequel to HEXEN 2039 which imagined new technologies for psychological warfare through investigating links between the occult and the military in relation to histories of witchcraft, the US film industry, British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing, behavior control experiments of the US Army's MKULTRA program and more recent practices of its Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (PSYOP), in light of contemporary neuro-scientific research. HEXEN2.0 delves deeper into the histories of scientific research behind government programs of mass control, in tandem with counter-cultural and grass roots movements, and creates a space for the imagining of alternative future scenarios. HEXEN2.0 charts, within a framework of post-WWII US governmental and military imperatives, the coming together of diverse scientific and social sciences through the development of cybernetics, the history of the internet, the rise of Web 2.0 and mass intelligence gathering, and the implications for the future of new systems of societal manipulation towards a control society. Furthermore, HEXEN2.0 investigates the participants of the seminal Macy Conferences1 (1943-1956) - whose primary goal was to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind - alongside specific critics of technological society such as Theodore Kaczynski/Unabomber, current profiles of Anarcho-Primitivists and Post Leftists, and traces the precursory ideas of Thoreau, Heidegger, Adorno and others in relation to fantasies of utopic/dystopic futures from science-fiction literature and film. Through representing and re-examining these subjects and histories through the lens of occult belief systems and ideas of the supernatural HEXEN2.0 takes us to a hypnotic, mesmerizing space of early technological fantasy and theory to hallucinate feedback from the past from where one may imagine and construct possible alternative futures. The information in HEXEN2.0 is based on actual events, people and histories.

Suzanne Treister (Author)

Lars Bang Larsen (Author)