Hexen2.0

The witchcraft tag undersells what Suzanne Treister's HEXEN 2.0 actually is: one of contemporary art's most serious tarot projects, the arcana redrawn as diagrams of technoscience's occulted history, cybernetics, counterculture, control societies, the internet's military childhood, each card a dense map of real actors and ideas. Treister's project, exhibited in the art world and published as a boxed deck, uses tarot's structure as an analytic instrument: the format that organizes archetypes here organizes the twentieth century's feedback loops. Reading with it is studying; draws deal you MK-ULTRA, macy conferences and cybernetic utopians in archetypal relation, conspiracy's actual documents arranged for contemplation. It is the bridge between the art-tarot shelf and the political one. It suits media theorists and art-world readers, students of technology's esoteric historiography, Treister's following, and anyone who suspected the Tower card was always about infrastructure. The pointy-hat constituency, warmly served elsewhere, will find these witches wore lab coats.