The Cybernetic Arcana: Hexen 2.0 & 5.0 Tarot with Suzanne Treister

Feb 22, 2025

Suzanne Treister, an artist and researcher known for her Hexen tarot decks, dives into the intriguing intersections of cybernetics, conspiracy, and counterculture. She discusses how feedback loops from cybernetics influence both the Hexen 2.0 and upcoming Hexen 5.0 decks, merging art and science. The conversation explores tarot’s role in activism, the potential of the 'Interplanetary Internet', and critiques of technology's impact on society. Treister also highlights the historical roots of these themes, encouraging a collective reinterpretation of our modern challenges.

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INSIGHT

From Cybernetics to Tarot

Suzanne Treister's interest in cybernetics led her to create Hexen 2.0.
She saw web 2.0 as a cybernetic feedback loop of control and aimed to create a tool for understanding and discussing potential futures.

INSIGHT

Macy Conferences and Control

The Macy conferences, focusing on cybernetics as a means of societal control, heavily influenced the deck's structure.
Treister assigned historical figures to tarot archetypes based on their roles and theories within this context.

INSIGHT

Counter-Canon of Cybernetics

Hexen 2.0 includes figures who challenge technological advancement, like Kaczynski and Zerzan.
Treister aimed to present diverse perspectives on technology's role in society, from anarcho-primitivism to warnings about uncontrolled development.

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Buy Hexen 2.0 Tarot and the forthcoming Hexen 5.0 Tarot: https://cosmogenesis.world

Preview Hexen 5.0's: new images: https://www.suzannetreister.net/HEXEN_5/HEXEN5.html

Lars Bang Larson's Essay: https://www.suzannetreister.net/HEXEN2/HEXEN_2_LBLessay.html

Note: if you were watching the tarot deck flip through on YouTube, you are seeing the Hexen 2.0 deck.

About the new deck:

HEXEN 5.0, an update of HEXEN 2.0 (2011), presents a critical, historical and mystical exploration of new global developments in terrestrial and interplanetary technologies, science and communications, corporate and governmental forces, the ecosystem and climate crisis, recent and traditional fields of knowledge and spirituality, new branches of bio/socio/political theory, contemporary countercultural and futuristic movements, new directions in science-fiction, and proposed possible solutions for an ethical survival of the human race.

The visual structure of the works is largely based on alchemical drawings of the 13th - 18th centuries, entwining these subjects into a holistic mystical space where they become differently animated and resonant. In alchemical drawings, science, art and religion/spirituality co-exist, echoing the recently converging fields illuminated in some of the cards, such as Spiritual Ecology, Nexus thinking and Earth System Science, fields which may lead to better solutions for the climate crisis and to returning the planet towards a self-regulating system.

Where HEXEN 2.0 analysed the legacy of cybernetics as embodied in Web 2.0 and systems of control, showing how Web 2.0 works as a societal controlling system, HEXEN 5.0 traces cybernetics' relevance to whole earth systems and how the cybernetic self-regulating feedback loops of the planetary ecosystem, which we have sent out of whack, need to be addressed through an understanding of the workings of the total global ecosystem. This is embodied in the aims of Earth System Science and potentially in an even more holistic system incorporating traditional knowledges and spirituality.

The published deck of tarot cards is intended to be used as a tool for groups to discuss and envision positive alternative futures and may be used in conjunction with HEXEN 2.0 Tarot deck.

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