Suzanne Treister

Interviews

Interview with Roger Luckhurst, 2009


Published in:

'The Machine & the Ghost: Technology & Spiritualism in 19th to 21st Century Art & Culture', Manchester University Press, UK 2013

' Documents of Contemporary Art: Science Fiction', Edited by Dan Byrne-Smith Published by Whitechapel Gallery, London and MIT Press, USA Feb 2020

Roger Luckhurst teaches in the School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of 'The Angle Between two Walls' The Fiction of J.G. Ballard (1997), The Invention of Telepathy (2002), Science Fiction (2005) and The Trauma Question (2008).

 

What Happens in the Gaps: An Interview with Suzanne Treister by Roger Luckhurst

 

Suzanne Treister was born in London, daughter of a Jewish-Polish exile. She trained at St Martin's School of Art (1978-81) and Chelsea School of Art (1981-2). She lives in London, but has spent time in Berlin, the USA and Australia. She was a pioneering digital artist, always interested in the science-fictional possibilities of computers and computing, and in 1995, she developed an avatar called Rosalind Brodsky, named after her grandmother. Brodsky was a time traveller who worked at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality sometime in the mid-21st century. Brodsky investigated the traumatic history of the 20th century, travelling to its pivotal moments. This passage through time was partly driven by an openly autobiographical attempt to 'rescue' Treister's grandparents, who had been killed in the genocide of Polish Jewry during the Second World War. As a patient possibly suffering from obsessional delusional fantasies, Rosalind Brodsky was apparently treated by Sigmund Freud in 1886 and 1928, by Carl Jung in 1958, by Jacques Lacan in 1970 and by Melanie Klein in 2058 (after Klein had been transported into the future), all of whom left case notes on Brodsky. Installations, art-works, case histories, a book, a website and an interactive CD-ROM, emerged from this project. The last Brodsky project was HEXEN 2039, which appeared in 2006 as an internet site, a movie, a series of exhibitions and interventions into places like the Science Museum, and a book. In a style that sometimes echoes the obsessional mapping and drawing associated with 'outsider art', HEXEN 2039 unravelled a host of links between military research, occult ritual, and mass popular culture. These diagrams make frenetic links between Second World War American rocket research, the smuggling of Nazi technicians, the black magic occultism of Aleister Crowley and other self-proclaimed masters of the dark arts, weird psychical research experiments, science fiction, The Wizard of Oz, and the Jewish Kabbala. Since HEXEN 2039, Treister has explored the NATO codification system (the military numbering system that categorises every object that exists in the world into a 4-number code, even including category 9999, 'items which cannot conceivably be classified in any existing classes'). MTB [Military Training Base] explores the use of virtual reality technology to train American soldiers for conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan and extends her manic mappings of hidden connections to epic scale (the exhibition centred on a diagram over 17 feet long). These projects are all offered in a deadpan style, leaving one uncertain about the level of irony in the conspiracy theories and density of interconnections that are being mapped out. That some of the connections made in the pieces are true is unnerving, for it is now well established that the American security services have often invested time and money into psychical and occult research programmes (projects that have become the basis for popular culture like the X Files). Where, though, does Treister leave documented history and enter the realms of paranoia, fantasy, or aesthetic transformation? Paranoid structures are notoriously difficult to disentangle from rational forms of interpretation, as both Freud and Lacan commented in their psychoanalytic studies. In the era of the internet, Treister's combination of interests in the history of technology, the military-industrial complex, and magical thinking about occult inter-connectedness makes her work an important reflection on our weird and wired condition of being.

Most of Treister's work is accessible in online form at http://www.suzannetreister.net

Our conversation took place in December 2009.

Like Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow or Stewart Home's use of the occult in his avant-garde provocations, your work leaves the viewer uncertain about where fact stops and fiction starts, or just how ironic the sketching of these intricate connections really is.

A friend warned me recently, 'Make sure you want to go over the line, because there's no coming back.' He was talking about knowing too much, too much basically about U.S. Military and Security history and programs. He himself is way over the line, although according to an NSA (U.S. National Security Agency) friend of his, there would be no way they could have a conversation together where they were both talking about the same things and knew what each other meant when it came to anything since 1945.

So firstly there is the issue of how informed the audience is, how able they are to distinguish between what may be actual and what might be invented, and because my work contains a lot of information unfamiliar to many people there are varying degrees of slippage, and that is interesting in itself.

With the HEXEN project, hardly anyone in the art world seemed familiar with the material I was referencing. Most of the reviewers assumed that I'd invented the whole thing, which I clearly hadn't. There really were men in the basement of Stanford Research Institute and at Fort Meade in Maryland carrying out experiments with 'remote viewing' for a military programme, and there is no question that MKULTRA took place and that it involved all kinds of experiments with drugs and the paranormal. They used the facilities of many U.S. universities, there are records to prove it, and the links between rocket scientists and the Ordo Templi Orientis have become public knowledge in books about the rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons. You'd have to be incredibly imaginative to invent all this stuff. Jon Ronson's book The Men Who Stare at Goats was one of the more interesting sources for the project because he was one of the only guys who'd interviewed people in the U.S. military who were doing the occult based research. His work validates much of the so-called 'conspiracy theory': these are real people doing real research. The American military have been interested in psychical warfare for a long time, since the Second World War at least. Some of those guys believe in it and others don't, but one of the reasons they do it is in case the other side are doing it.

I read pretty widely on the history of military-occult relationships, from the Druids, through Rasputin, Dr John Dee, the Soviet experiments and up to the present day and a lot of that material is in HEXEN 2039. It was just a matter of threading it together with the other areas I was investigating for the project, like current neuroscientific research, and coming up with my own theory of potential future technologies and objectives within this strand of military research, and where that might take us. What happens in the gaps is the art bit.

The other difficulty of reading the work is that it's often filtered through a persona , so these are actually the researches of Rosalind Brodsky, rather than Suzanne Treister. It's another level of mediation or ironic displacement: Brodsky sets up another screen in front of the information.

The fiction and also the twist in HEXEN 2039, made possible through the Brodsky/IMATI construct, is the idea that this research into the military's (actual) historical involvement in the occult and alternative belief systems is itself part of a British military operation called HEXEN 2039, which takes place in the future and whose outcome is the development of new mind control technologies which enable the military, in turn, to remotely (at a distance) alter belief patterns in the subject, whether military or civilian.

HEXEN 2039 was the last Brodsky project of many, and in this instance she was somewhat in the background. But it's important to know how the work has developed because it's a sort of unfolding narrative. If you read Brodsky's diary which I wrote back in the 1990s and navigated the CD-ROM of her time travels, you'd know what the Institute of Militronics was about and something of the nature of its research. It's kind of like an imaginary SRI International of the UK.(1) IMATI is based in the near future and the more recent projects focus on the programmes of the Institute rather than the life of Brodsky. So the work is like a vast diagram or web that you have to follow. The whole thing is a sci-fi construct, like a series of novels set in the future but drawing upon the past.

How would you characterise your relationship to this material: ambivalent?

In terms of the military material and focus it's not really about ambivalence but more about ideas of complicity, since we are all complicit. My father ran a defence spares business and combined with my family's wartime history. I developed a love-hate relationship with things associated with the military, which is different from ambivalence. And there is the issue of science fiction writers who imagine new military technologies and whose ideas may in turn contribute to military's research, which may or may not have been their intention. I certainly never wanted to make didactic, political work that's against war per se, it's unrealistic. I'm not a straight down the line pacifist, nor am I an artist-activist. I can't make that kind of art, but my work is political. I'm interested in difficult complicities, collusion, ideas of responsibility and accountability and knowledge.

And does this position extend to your use of the occult? You have not only documented the military's use of the occult but in HEXEN you have experimented with it yourself...

I'm not completely about suspending the question of belief in my work. I have no fixed beliefs. I don't believe in binaries like normal-paranormal. We are all chameleons and we have moving, shifting parts and that includes our brains. About three times a year in synagogue I can feel like a total Jew, I can even believe in God, for a few seconds I am tuned in to a different level of understanding. Then on other occasions, when for example I made my own remote viewing experiments for HEXEN 2039, I experienced a hit, first time I visualised the target so accurately it blew my socks off. I've heard that's common, and then you apparently have to undergo training (laughs). Other times I am a total cynic, but days later I may feel the world is a place of strange paranormal forces and fantastical mysteries.

I get the sense that you want to fully investigate the practices of what might be called 'subjugated knowledges' - whether it's remote viewing, or using the kabbalah, or the manic drawing methods typical of 'outsider art.'

I want to appropriate them. Yes, I want to use these methods myself; I'm not a hands-off person. It's territorial, I like owning things. If I can get my hands on the crystal the Elizabethan alchemist John Dee used for his scrying from the Science Museum, I'm going to use it. When it comes to 'manic drawing methods', these come about quite naturally when you have to include so much information and you are doing it by hand on a plain sheet of paper. Unless of course you mean the drawings where I have appropriated existing alchemical drawings as a structural/conceptual device.

In Alchemy and A Time Line for Science Fiction Inventions, for example, did you do deep research or do you just appropriate these alchemical and kabbalistic structures aesthetically?

A Time Line for Science Fiction Inventions uses the Kabbalah's tree of life. I know what it's about. I had to, to make the decision to use it, it's part of the work. But some of the source material for the Alchemy project comes from a book of alchemical drawings by Alexander Roob that I bought when I was living in Berlin and it's in German, which means I can't understand each caption fully. So when I chose which alchemical drawing to use in conjunction with information from a specific newspaper I was deliberately half in the dark. I've read widely on alchemy, but this semi-random way of choosing specific drawings made the process more exciting and opened up each work to additional undetermined readings.

Do you have any responses from people who claim to know the magical tradition, that praise or complain about your uses of it?

I haven't had any complaints from religious or spiritualist groups, but I do get a lot of interest from people who write blogs and various types of conspiracy theory websites. Many of them have copied my images onto their pages and in some cases have made links from their own sites to the HEXEN site in order to substantiate their data. In most cases I don't think they realise it's an art project. For some of them it isn't, it's an information site similar to theirs. But then again some of their sites look like other people's art projects. I keep a record of these blogs and what they're saying. There was a long review on one of them which was incredibly interesting. Someone like that is so well informed about the subject matter, compared to an average art critic, that they could discuss it at great length so this guy wrote a really rigorous and critical review of the material without any sense of it being art whatsoever. Once when I was doing a public gallery talk on HEXEN 2039 in a regional museum there was an elderly couple who looked really angry throughout the talk. During question time they erupted and demanded to know why I hadn't included so-and-so or referred to such-and-such. They were infuriated. According to them, I had edited various people out of history. I enjoy this kind of interaction because it becomes part of the work. If you work on webs of information and connectedness, and especially if you put them online, then you can't control the boundaries of whether it is perceived as art or not. That said, the same thing could go for an FBI agent looking at my work, as for a conspiracy theory blogger.

Yes, there's no way to negate a conspiracy theory, because the refusal or denial itself becomes part of the conspiracy: however odd, every position is incorporated.

Well at this point I think we should define what we mean when we say conspiracy theory. It's not a simple category. The term 'conspiracy theorist' can include on the one hand people who believe the Illuminati are camping out in their neighbour's flat, and on the other hand can include people who have access to facts which others, out of ignorance, deem hallucinatory.

Let's talk about your family background. Rosalind Brodsky is named in memory of your grandmother, who died in the Holocaust in Poland. Your father got out, fought in the French Resistance, and after the war went on to set up an arms dealership.

Yes, after the French Resistance my father escaped to the UK to join the Polish Army in Scotland and then the Polish Government in Exile in London. After the war, in the UK, he couldn't immediately use his qualifications in law and political sciences (from the University of Lwow and L'École des Sciences Politiques in Paris) so he went into business selling equipment left over from World War II. It was supposed to be a temporary measure. I was brought up being told he was director of an electronics import/export company. That's what I put on the forms I had to fill in at school. I can't remember when I found out what it actually was. Sometime in my teens.

My father had me when he was quite old and I sometimes feel like I'm out of sync with my generation in terms of historical events. When my friends talk about the Second World War, they're usually talking about their grandparents' time. My school-friends came from settled middle-class families, their parents all seemed to work for the BBC, some were hippies (albeit of the 1960s Hampstead variety), whilst my dad was this authoritarian Polish aristocrat who didn't want to read any more books, had a drawer full of Holocaust photos and traded in spare parts for military equipment.

And the Brodsky project shows you're very aware of psychoanalytic ideas about transmission, the idea that the children of Holocaust survivors have the trauma passed on, what's sometimes called 'transgenerational haunting.'

Yes, I know. It is all true. I can confirm it. In the past some people have become angry when I've mentioned the war and accused me of trying to get some sort of mileage out of it, but they don't understand that it's real. I think it's had an effect on a lot of decisions I've made in my life, good, bad and in-between.

I had to come back to all this in 2000, when my father asked me to design his company website. I was ideologically against the idea and fought with him but eventually I agreed. As he was always too busy I had to do the research myself, going round the whole company gathering material. The only thing he insisted on explaining to me was the NATO codification system. It was crucial to identify all of the parts he sold, which were often simultaneously listed under completely different numbers in other coding systems. He was obsessed with all this cross-referencing; his manuals were yellowed and frayed like heavily thumbed bibles.

When I did the website, I felt uneasy about it, for weeks my brain was full of pictures of tanks, warrior ships and other images from Jane's defence annuals. When the site was up, as a way of negotiating my complicity, I decided to acknowledge it as one of my art projects, so I put in a link to it from my homepage. Then by way of explanation I added an intermediary page which included biographical details about my father and the company and my childhood stamp collection, which had come from mail sent to the office. The company has now been sold and the current owner's web page is different, but I've kept the original files and debated whether to put the original website back online as part of my own site. Legally, though, that would cause serious difficulties.

So lots of projects since have been a product of that experience?

The NATO project came directly out of making the company website because that's where I came across the codification system. It's totally surreal: it's like a Borges novel. I mean, NATO probably have no idea how odd it looks, from the outside, they think they're being logical and businesslike, but to me, the idea of giving a 4 digit military group-classification number to everything from works of art to live animals is disturbing. Apparently it's becoming a universal system.

Not HEXEN 2039, then?

Not specifically, that comes out of the Rosalind Brodsky and the Institute of Militronics project, which I began in 1995 and which came out of the broader family experiences you were talking about. For five years, I was working on the historical materials, Brodsky's biography, the book and the CD-ROM, which came out in 1999. During that time I was living in Australia, and being a long way from Europe, roots became very much more important. It was during this period that I went to Ukraine (in the area that was part of south east Poland before 1939) with my brother to try and find my father's village.

In 2000 while I was moving more frequently between Australia and Europe and the Brodsky CD-ROM was finished, I decided it would be interesting to try and expand on the hypothetical and supposedly controversial activities of the Institute. Back in Australia I developed a couple of early research projects of the Institute, one of which was Golem/Loew:Artificial Life and then when I moved to Berlin in 2003, Operation Swanlake.

While living in Berlin I became obsessed with the weird underbelly of German culture. My relationship with Germany is inevitably ambivalent and I was trying to confront the reality of Germany now. It was another one of those love-hate relationships. There's something about Berlin that is horrifyingly stimulating because of its weight of history, everything is in your face, not only the Holocaust but the DDR period and also much older histories and aspects of the culture. I became fascinated by the history of witchcraft in Germany. I decided in Berlin that I wanted to do a project on the occult and I came across a lot of interesting material in the flea markets. Although to some extent the Golem/Loew and Operation Swanlake projects had touched on the occult, it wasn't until 2005 that I decided to make a project that encompassed it more fully. Before that, I'd say that science fiction and history were the main interest. The occult stuff really only began to make sense in Germany. You might say it was an evasion tactic, away from the historical political realities, and into the belly of the beast and it was when I first went to the Harz mountains, which has a huge witchcraft tradition linked to it, that I decided to go back with my video camera for Walpurgisnacht the following April.

While gathering material for what was to become HEXEN 2039 I was simultaneously developing the narrative, which due to the nature of the Institute, had to have a military imperative. And then, once I'd decided that HEXEN was to be set in 2039, it was a matter of working out a hypothetical future military research project that could potentially develop out of the material I was investigating. I had been interested in ideas of the occult as a teenager, but it was really being in Germany that brought it back out. For a long time, I think, my interest in science and technology substituted for it, because science and technology are always moving towards things we don't understand.

Your work seems to very consciously move with technological developments. You've worked on CD-ROMs, designed computer animations, were involved in digital arts very early on, and your website is now a crucial part of your practice.

I actually got into computers because I became fascinated by the idea of video games. I've talked about that a lot in other interviews. As soon as I could afford to get a computer that could do graphics I got one. That was in 1991. But it was much more analytical at that stage, I was interested in a cultural commentary on computer games and new technologies. I got my first computer, an Amiga, while I was reading William Gibson's Neuromancer. The thing about Gibson is that it's not just science fiction but was about defining our contemporary environment. It seemed to me that so called science fiction was doing this better than art. When I went to Australia, I couldn't take the computer with me, so I backtracked a little and returned to painting. I made a series of software boxes, hypothetical software packages that might exist in the future. In a way, at the time, this seemed more interesting than anything that computers could actually do, since they were quite limited back then.

So by HEXEN 2039 had the technology caught up with the idea?

Well to turn that around a little, the future technology that HEXEN 2039 hypothesises may not be that far away, according to a scientist I met at a conference in 2007. Apparently it's currently being researched in Maryland.

But the thing about the current tech world, which, unlike 20 years ago, is the world most of us are now immersed in, is that it's so much about being at the cutting edge of the latest gizmo, and the latest gizmo is more and more about government and corporate control of content and information, and so I got less interested in taking part in that. I'm interested in technology as a phenomenon, an ongoing trajectory into the future, but not necessarily in using the latest technology itself to make art. Nor am I a Net activist or part of the open source movement, although I'm for both of these in principle. I felt it was more important to stand outside of these environments, not end up incorporated into them.

I like the idea of going back to old technologies to think about new technologies. This is why HEXEN 2039 and MTB [Military Training Base] use drawing, sketching out networks and links in pencil, making a physical work outside of the internet, something that can't be deleted by the flick of a switch. These projects have related websites with remote links to other sites and so on, but I want them to end up as books too; I'd be very depressed if there wasn't some outcome in book form. The process is like writing a book, a graphic novel, a piece of science fiction. Science fiction is full of all these meta-commentaries and info-dumps and I love that capacity. So they're on the internet, but also it was very important that HEXEN existed in the old technology of the book. One day way in the future, if the planet survives, or let's say the Unabomber gets out of his prison cell in Colorado and destroys the complete worldwide technological infrastructure, maybe someone will pick up HEXEN in a second hand bookshop, if such things remain, and wonder 'what the hell was that? Is that all true?'

Every modern technology seems to have an occult double - the telegraph and spirits, the tape deck and voices of the dead, the internet and its deities and ghosts. Is there something intrinsically spooky about technology?

I think one of my future software boxes had 'Spooky' written on it...

Well, by its very nature technology is spooky, it preserves the dead, in film and video, on tape, on cd, on the internet, every day millions of dead people or 'ghosts' are walking around doing things; shopping, chatting, having coffee, going on holiday, discussing the meaning of life. In the same film, one of the players may be dead and another alive, there is nothing in the technology of video for example to differentiate, to tell us which is which, whereas online a site can be updated to reflect changes. Perhaps in this sense the internet is not as intrinsically spooky as film or video or audio recordings. But in another sense it's spookier, especially now that we have the idea of the all encompassing Cloud to look forward to, a massive techno space where all our data could end up under government lock and key, with corporations like YouTube co-owning everyone's home movies, you only have to use your imagination to wonder what may become of all this stuff one day, the future is getting weirder. There doesn't need to be a master plan for it to happen.

There is something spooky for us about technology because it transcends the human body. The whole idea of virtual reality is spooky. I used to go to the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus and play on all the state of the art VR games they had there in the 1980s. In video games you die time and again in a virtual space but you remain alive in the real world. And now the U.S. military are training soldiers using the multi-user computer games inspired DARWARS program, 'allowing continuous on-demand training anywhere, anytime, for everyone.' That sounds pretty spooky to me.(2)

I suppose the big claim about your work would be that it's all an attempt to understand the trajectory of post-war history, its personal, familial and national consequences, its military and domestic technologies, and the rise of the military-industrial complex. Perhaps the only way to tell aspects of this hidden history is to go to the occult or other kinds of marginal knowledges, because it is a means of getting outside the official history, the record of the victors.

That's a big question. But as I've said earlier, in terms of the military, the occult is now an acknowledged part of the official history. Anything you can do they can do better.

I guess when I started working with new technologies they were a marginal knowledge and I thought I was going to discover something about where they were taking us whilst trying to control and make use of them myself. The first text I wrote about the Brodsky project in 1995 contained this paragraph: 'Rosalind Brodsky comes from a mixed background, part Anglo-Christian, part Eastern European Jewish. Brodsky fetishizes history. She becomes a necrophiliac invader of spaces containing the deaths of her ancestors, through the privileged violence of technology.' That was very much 1990s techno-speak but I think it means something quite real.

Since I was a teenager I always wanted to change the world, but then some people say maybe the world doesn't want to be changed. And we all know one man's utopia is another man's hell. When I explored the whole fantasy through Brodsky of travelling back in history to rescue my grandparents from the Holocaust, it was a fantasy intervention into history. There are things both in the past, and in the future, which you can't change. As you say you can just try and get a better understanding of them, and knowledge can be empowering, but it can also be depressing.

With the HEXEN project, and the sequel, HEXEN 2.0, which I'm now embarking on, it's on one level about trying to imagine a worst case scenario of what the military-industrial-academic-scientific-media complex might do to us and how we might in turn attempt to alter the course of history. I was told as a child that people went to the gas chambers like sheep, and since the age of five I've been planning how not to be a sheep. Maybe I am a paranoid conspiracy theorist, for example I refuse to join any social networking sites as that would implicate my friends in my activities. For most people this isn't a problem. But for me, the fact is that the National Socialists did come and get my grandparents. If, for example, the political situation in the UK changed significantly, it would be quite possible to find yourself in a category that some people didn't want to have around. This is what happened in Poland. This is what happened in 2004 in the U.S. to the artist Steve Kurtz.(3)

So you take a dystopian view of the future? That techno-culture is an ever-encroaching, inhuman totality?

It's obvious. Ultimately the larger the weapon the greater the threat. That doesn't mean a lot of people aren't going to benefit in all kinds of ways before we get there or something else gets there first.

Are we back to ambivalence then? About never being sure about the epistemological status of the knowledges you map, whether itÕs true or false?

True or false is not the point. All the information in my work is on one level or another true. There is no invention, just re-presentation. There is so much recent art commentary rhetoricising this supposedly fascinating blurry area between fact and fiction. These people are missing the point. It's an academic fence sitter position. There is no fence. Nowhere is a fence. There is only exposure of the horror and the joy and the bits in between, but there are no fences.

 

Notes

1) SRI International. This is an independent scientific research institute whose clients include government agencies, commercial businesses and other types of organisations. Originally named Stanford Research Institute, it used to be part of Stanford University until the time of the Vietnam war when there was a lot of protest from people within the university who felt that its U.S. military (DARPA) funded work was co-opting the university into the military industrial complex. For more details, about SRI International, See http://www.sri.com/about/

2) DARWARS Program: http://www.darpa.mil/dso/archives/darwars/index.htm

3) The Steve Kurtz case: http://www.caedefensefund.org/.
'The surreal nightmare of internationally-acclaimed artist and professor Steve Kurtz began when his wife Hope died in her sleep of heart failure. Police who responded to Kurtz's 911 call deemed Kurtz's art suspicious and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was detained as a suspected "bioterrorist" as dozens of federal agents in Hazmat suits sifted through his work and impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, his cat, and even his wife's body. Today Kurtz and his long-time collaborator Dr. Robert Ferrell, Professor of Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, await a trial date.' See http://www.strangeculture.net/

 

Suggested Reading

Roger Cardinal, Outsider Art (London: Studio Vista, 1972).

Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (London: SerpentÕs Tail, 1999).

Daniel and Jason Freeman, Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Richard Grayson, 'Only Connect' in Suzanne Treister, 3 Projects: Alchemy, Correspondence from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and War Artists (London: Annely Juda Fine Art, 2008), n.p.

Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, 'From Concretism to Metaphor: Thoughts on Some Theoretical and Technical Aspects of the Psychoanalytic Work with Children of Holocaust Survivors', The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 39 (1984), 301-19.

Stewart Home, Mind Invaders: Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism (London: Serpent's Tail, 1997).

Peter Knights, Conspiracy Culture From Kennedy to the X Files (London: Routledge, 2001).

Roger Luckhurst, 'The Science-Fictionalization of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives of Alien Abduction', Science Fiction Studies 25: 1 (1998), 29-52.

Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

David Maclagan, Outsider Art: From the Margins to the Marketplace (London: Reaktion, 2009).

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (London: Picador, 1975).

Jyanni Steffensen, 'Doing it Digitally: Rosalind Brodsky and the Art of Virtual Female Subjectivity', in Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds), Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2002), 209-33.

Suzanne Treister, ...No Other Symptoms: Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999). Includes CD-ROM.

Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2039: New Military Occult Technologies for Psychological Warfare (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006).

Suzanne Treister, 'From Fictional Video Game Stills to Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky 1991-2005' in Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell (eds), Videogames and Art (London: Intellect Books, 2007), 130-43.

Suzanne Treister, NATO: The Military Codification System for the Ordering of Everything in the World (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2008).