TAROT CARDS

Suzanne Treister’s tarot comprises of a stack of seventy-eight cards, which are part of the series HEXEN 2.0. With this body of work, Treister visualises dystopic and utopic futures by exploring the histories behind government programs, juxtaposing genealogies of countercultural and grassroots movements, and charting the formations of diverse scientific and social sciences through the development of cybernetics, the history of the internet, the rise of Web 2.0, and programmes of mass control and social manipulation. The card presented depicts Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), who was a British mathematician and writer and was the first to recognise that machines had applications beyond pure calculation; Lovelace published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is sometimes regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of a “computing machine”. She is one of the first computer programmers and ultimately the inventor of the algorithm.