Suzanne Treister, Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky, 1997-99; Rosalind Brodsky's Real Estate Conference, 1999
SELBY NIMROD: How did you come to make this work?
SUZANNE TREISTER: It started in 1995 when I invented the character Rosalind Brodsky, who was connected to the idea of my Polish Jewish grandmother murdered in the Holocaust. In a strange way, I wanted to reincarnate her. I wanted to give her the opportunity to be an artist, to do something, to have another life. Her name was Rosalia Blum, so it isn’t totally similar [to Rosalind Brodsky], but it's connected.
The first thing I did was write a short biography. I invented the essential narrative in 1995, the one that’s on my website, and then made time traveling costumes for visiting the Russian Revolution, another for the 1960s, and one to go rescue my grandparents from the Holocaust.
It was quite obvious to me from the beginning that Rosalind Brodsky was like an alter ego. Today, you might say avatar; at the time the term was heteronymic identity. It was a bit blurry; the question of whether it was me making that work or her making that work, or whether it was me making work about a fictional character or whether she was like an alter ego, but it doesn’t really matter.
SN: I think it does. That tension is felt throughout the project. There’s the “essential narrative,” then there are things that you write in that undermine the narrative you’re creating, and then there are physical objects that could be said to offer a kind of documentation or “proof” of Rosalind’s journeys through time.
ST: According to the story, in the mid-‘90s she [Rosalind] was teaching new media at a London art school. That was quite deliberate, because in the mid-‘90s no London art schools taught new media. There was hostility to the idea of making work on a computer. At that point it wasn't generally considered art. So I inserted her as a lecturer in a department that didn't exist. Meanwhile, I was in Adelaide in Australia.
Rosalind supposedly went on a trip to Paris to have a psychoanalytic session with [famed theorist of the abject] Julia Kristeva. It was during that session, when Kristeva reminded her of this photo that her father had of his mother, which he had had colorized in the 1970s, that she experienced time travel for the first time. The whole idea of this time travel is very ambiguous because in one thread of the narrative, she imagines—you could say it's a continuing delusional episode—that she is working in the future at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality. In this fictional version of London in the 21st century, no one is sure whether this Institute has found the secret of time travel or if they're just making virtual simulations of historical periods in time in order to carry out anthropological research. In the CD-ROM an armed group of academics demonstrates outside the Institute against the use of that type of technology and virtual reality for research.
In a way, the project’s fiction is set up in multiple dimensions. And I suppose once you've entered it, Rosalind Brodsky is a time traveler, and the Institute is one that exists within the fictions. When people question this, I remind them that in a novel these things are absolutely normal; it's just in art that they seem peculiar.
Suzanne Treister, Rosalind Brodsky, Brighton Beach, NY, USA on view at the Rosalind Brodsky Memorial Exhibition 2058, Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI)
SN: Where did you imagine people apprehending this work? Did you imagine that people would do it at home on their own computer, or did you imagine it being presented spatially?
ST: Initially, the CD-ROM appeared at a lot of new media festivals. At the 1998 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Liverpool it was installed in a large space. You came in and stood at this console lectern with a mouse on it, and then on the big screen at the end of the room the image of the CD-ROM was projected. You were like, on the Starship Enterprise! I think that was the ultimate way of interacting with it.
SN: Were you considering how the work would be accessed by an audience when you made it?
ST: While I was making the CD-ROM, it was quite clear to me that this technology may not last. Every five minutes something was going out of date and there was this technological arms race starting. And I thought, well, I'm spending about five years on this thing and need to make a parallel version. I applied for funding from the Australian Council to make a book.
Unfortunately, the book reduced the whole thing to a single linear form, but it included the CD-ROM because you could also mass produce it. That meant that this work could be distributed in bookshops. It meant that people would be able to have this disc that they could play at home. Once the disc stopped being able to play, they'd have the book in which I’d put more or less every screen image from the CD-ROM. Some of the images were quite small, but I managed to make a roughly linear version of the whole thing. Obviously there's no sound, there's no video, there's no interaction, but there's enough there to get the sense of what it might've been. And then if someone one day was able to access the old technology, they'd have the disc, which I made both Mac and Windows compatible.
SN: I love that you preempted technological obsolescence and chose such an egalitarian distribution model.
ST: I think that has a lot to do with the grassroots internet of the 1990s. I very much reacted against the mainstream art world in the ‘80s in London. The kinds of things that were happening to me, my friends, I didn't feel comfortable with. They weren't why I became an artist. As soon as I got into computers and as soon as I realized that a whole other dimension was happening with the internet, I jumped straight into it. It was about sharing and exchanging and reaching all types of people who were outside of the art world.
Since that time, I always tried to allow my work to manifest itself in different forms, so it can exist as equally in a commercial art gallery as in a book that can be bought by a teenager somewhere, or something that can be seen online and downloaded for free. That decision to make it a widely distributed thing was super important to me because I can't cope with the idea of only making art that ends up in one person's home. I can't handle it.
SN: I want to ask if you feel like the CD-ROM is the definitive version of the work? How do you understand its currently accessible incarnation to function—which is a series of interrelated webpages hosted on your main site?
ST: So the thing is, the website was really the first way of getting it out there. I've mostly built my work online. I start building my projects offline on Dreamweaver, as a web version. And that's how they grow, that's how I can view them. I don't have a studio where I put it up all around the walls. I construct it inside my laptop, in that virtual space as I go along.
SN: Even the paintings?
ST: Oh yeah. I mean, everything. Most of my projects have so many components, if it’s watercolors, there might be 200. I scan everything as soon as I do it, and it gradually builds up on my laptop as an offline website. That's how I start visualizing how things fit together. I'll start writing blurbs about it on that website. Eventually, when it's finished, it goes online.
So getting back to Rosalind Brodsky, in about 2000 I realized that I'd never really said what the Institute itself did, what its research projects were. That's when I decided I'd better do them myself, so those are not in the CD-ROM because in linear, actual time I did them after the CD-ROM was finished, so they couldn't become reincorporated into it. Had I had that option, I would have tried, but that would have involved me having to time travel myself.
And I had been trying—I was thinking about applying to one of these university research positions when we came back to England, to actually figure out time traveling machines. But that didn't work out either.
SN: Now you actually start sounding like Rosalind!
ST: [Laughs] Yeah, and it’s my voice in the CD-ROM. I pitched my voice up for Rosalind, because my voice is quite low. I only had to pitch it up one notch to sound more girly. All the men in the CD-ROM are my voice as well, pitched down one notch.
SN: It’s very economical but it also feels like a literary device. For me, that adds to the complexity of all the different narratives and the tensions between truth, fact, and history that simmer throughout the work. Earlier you said that no one asks a novelist why they write fiction, but I think there’s something different here because you are a visual artist. Even though you’ve said in the past, “I don’t know if it (Rosalind Brodsky) was art.” I want to go ahead and say it is.
ST: My work has been on the internet a long time and there’s an awful lot of stuff on my site. At one point, I was getting lots of emails from people who were asking, “What is this?” Because they hadn't a clue that it was art. There's nothing on my website that says: This is an art project. And most artist websites look like a gallery’s, made with Wordpress.
Until the internet, when you saw art, you knew it was supposed to be art because you had to go through the door of an art gallery, or a museum, or open up an art book. There was no question about the entry point, it was fixed. With the internet, because most people navigate via a search engine, they might arrive at a page on my site through searching for something which is also a subject or key word in one of my projects, when they might have been looking for something more "factual."
“Why?” is the big question. The point of art is that it's usually dysfunctional; that tends to be its nature. And so people from outside the art world come into this dysfunctional world, which is full of material that they're interested in, but they can't see why it's there. It's a really weird feeling to try to flip around.
SN: That’s art doing what it’s supposed to do! And it mirrors another confusion I keep returning to: the one between you, Suzy; the character, Rosalind Brodsky; and your grandmother, Rosalia Blum. There's something intergenerational at play in the work, psychically, with trauma. I want to ask you about some of the historical flash points you chose to highlight through Rosalind’s time travels. You talk about the work as commentary but in some ways it’s also science fiction, which almost always offers a critique of contemporary politics or ideology. What were some of the ways that you wanted to think critically about revisiting this history?
ST: They were pivotal moments of historical, societal change—the 1960s and the Russian Revolution quite clearly so, the Holocaust less clearly so—but then this morning I thought about how in HEXEN 2.0 I covered the Macy Conferences, which took place in the aftermath of WWII in an attempt to develop cybernetic theory and a unified theory of the human mind in order to control it, to avoid another fascist uprising in the world, and which ironically developed the foundations for a control society.
Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2.0/Historical Diagrams/From National Socialism via Cybernetics and the Macy Conferences to Neo-Totalitarianism, 2009-11
✸ "It was during a residency in the Texan desert early in 2009 that I first observed a possible connection between the mid twentieth century theories and applications of cybernetics, which arose out of WWII, primarily in the USA where they answered a perceived need for a more controlled society, and our current world of online social media and what is referred to as Web 2.0. The link was feedback, as in cybernetic feedback loops, with a potential outcome not only of human connectivity and autopoiesis, but also of governmental control. The historical diagrams, which function as the key to the project, are an attempt to map out specific histories and to show how those histories interrelate, as a means of understanding how we got to where we are and where we may be going from here, in terms of the relationships between technology and politics and war and society."
SN: In an episode of the “Time Travelling Cookery Show” there’s a moment halfway through, as Rosalind is turning Black Forest cake into chocolate and cherry pierogis, where she talks about how she first made the dish when she attempted to travel back to save her grandparents from the Holocaust, but wasn’t able to find them. It's woven in as an offhanded comment, but it really hits. In some ways, that feels like the heart of the work.
ST: My father was from Poland, went to Paris, and was in the French Resistance. He escaped to London towards the end of the war. When I was six, he showed me these black and white photos of concentration camps taken by his friend, the famous Resistance courier Jan Karski, who brought them to London from Eastern Europe in 1943. Karski wanted them to be published by the British. The Foreign Office wouldn’t publish them, but my father kept some of the photographs. I had this memory of seeing them. From a very early age I knew my grandparents had been killed, probably in Auschwitz, and I knew that lots of members of his family had gone to other concentration camps. It wasn't until I was in Australia that I became truly obsessed about this. When I came back to England, I had dinner with my parents and I asked my dad if I could look at those photographs he showed me as a child, and what they were. He denied it, like "No, no, no, I don't know what you're talking about.” I asked him for weeks and weeks. Then one day, when my brother was around, I brought it up again and my brother said, I know those photographs, they're in my old bedroom in a filing cabinet.
There was a brown A4 envelope. In it were 10 x 8 inch black and white photographs with rabbis digging in quarries, naked people standing in front of a pit, photographs of newspaper articles about destroyed synagogues. About 30 or so of these photographs, it was unbelievable; there they were, I hadn't imagined it. From reading the book that Jan Karski wrote, Story of a Secret State, I realized there were originally thousands of these photographs that he brought, while this selection must've been the ones that my father had especially chosen to take home. I think all of that was the background to what set me up with this project. Whatever else it's about, it's mostly my Holocaust novel.
SN: I want to ask you about Rosalind's name cards (business cards) and some of the other physical objects. Clearly, the psychoanalyst’s case histories are digital; they look like they were designed on a computer. But the name cards, the costumes, the attaché cases, the assemblage of Rosalind’s secret phone line to the Kremlin, all of those are documented on the website but are also objects that exist in the material world.
ST: I made those things at the very beginning while I was in Adelaide, when I still had a studio, before I gave it up to enter the screen in my spare room. Every time I traveled, airports had those machines where you could print your name cards. Some kind of intermediary technology available to the public, like an extension of those ID photo booths, and there was this choice of a motif, you could choose anything. I haven't seen one of these machines for a very long time but in the mid-'90s they suddenly were everywhere. Whenever I saw one, I couldn't resist getting another name card done for Rosalind Brodsky.
Suzanne Treister, Rosalind Brodsky's Namecards, 1995-99
Suzanne Treister, Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky, 1997-99
Suzanne Treister, Rosalind Brodsky, Brighton Beach, NY, USA on view at the Rosalind Brodsky Memorial Exhibition 2058, Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI)
Suzanne Treister, No Other Symptoms: Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky, 1997-99. Interactive CD-ROM with 124 page full color hardback book. Published by Black Dog Publishing Limited, London, UK, 1999
Suzanne Treister, No Other Symptoms: Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky, 1997-99. Interactive CD-ROM with 124 page full color hardback book. Published by Black Dog Publishing Limited, London, UK, 1999. Book pages 5, 122, 123, 23, 12, and 15. (See all: www.suzannetreister.net)
Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2.0/Historical Diagrams/From National Socialism via Cybernetics and the Macy Conferences to Neo-Totalitarianism, 2009-11
✸ "It was during a residency in the Texan desert early in 2009 that I first observed a possible connection between the mid twentieth century theories and applications of cybernetics, which arose out of WWII, primarily in the USA where they answered a perceived need for a more controlled society, and our current world of online social media and what is referred to as Web 2.0. The link was feedback, as in cybernetic feedback loops, with a potential outcome not only of human connectivity and autopoiesis, but also of governmental control. The historical diagrams, which function as the key to the project, are an attempt to map out specific histories and to show how those histories interrelate, as a means of understanding how we got to where we are and where we may be going from here, in terms of the relationships between technology and politics and war and society."
Suzanne Treister, Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky, 1997-99
