fig-2 14/50: HEXEN 2.0 tarot reading by Mark Pilkington

During fig–2’s presentation of Suzanne Treister’s HEXEN 2.0 project, Mark Pilkington will conduct a group tarot reading using the HEXEN 2.0 deck.

The HEXEN 2.0 Tarot features 78 alchemical drawings depicting interconnected histories of the computer and the internet, cybernetics and the counterculture, science-fiction and scientific projections of the future, government and military research programmes, social engineering and ideas of the control society, alongside diverse philosophical, literary and political responses to advances in technology, including the claims of anarcho-primitivism, technogaianism, and transhumanism.

Through representing and re-examining these subjects and histories through the lens of occult belief systems and ideas of the supernatural, the HEXEN 2.0 Tarot takes us to a hypnotic, mesmerising space from where one may imagine and construct possible alternative futures.

Acknowledging precendents such as the traditional tarot deck, The Rider-Waite Tarot Deck and Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot Deck, Suzanne Treister has here produced a new Tarot, that allows a reader, or a group of readers working collaboratively, to use the cards to reconfigure history and/or map out hypothetical future narratives.

14/50 Suzanne Treister is at fig-2 from Monday 6 – Sunday 12 April 2015