Dreaming at CERN

The artists Suzanne Treister (b.1958) and Patricia Domínguez (b.1984) first met in 2022, when they were both commissioned to produce public murals in the Danish town of Holbæk. There, they spent two weeks living as neighbours and formed a close friendship. Many shared themes and interests emerge throughout the artists’ multifaceted practices, which are centred on ideas of technology, spirituality and ecology. A pioneer in the new media field since the 1990s, Treister works with video, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and watercolour to interrogate the relationship between technologies, societies and alternative belief systems. Domínguez often stages shrine-like installations that incorporate video and sculpture to exorcise the effects of late capitalism and ecological destruction, while also exploring the potential of artistic imagination as a form of psychic emancipation. 

Both also share the experience of having undertaken research at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Meyrin (CERN). In 2018 Treister received the Collide Award, which allows artists to spend time working alongside particle physicists and engineers. Treister arrived at CERN with a research question: ‘Is the holographic universe principle – the theory that our universe could be a vast and complex hologram – something artists may have unconsciously sought to express since the beginning of our civilisation?’. Her project, The Holographic Universe Theory of Art History (THUTOAH) (2018), projects over 25,000 images from art history and conceptually echoes the actions of the Large Hadron Collider, accelerating at twenty-five images per second in a looped sequence. Four years later, Treister returned to CERN for Scientific Dreaming (2022), in which she attempted to expand the unconscious imagination of scientists in order to envisage positive futures. In 2021 Domínguez was a recipient of the Simetría Prize, a dual residency between CERN and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomy facilities in Chile: Antofagasta, La Silla and the ALMA observatory. The culmination of her time at these sites, the video Tres Lunas Más Abajo (Three Moons Below; 2023–24), will premiere at Cecilia Brunson Projects, London, this month (17th September–25th October 2024).

In this conversation, the artists reflect on their research and projects at CERN and discuss entangled particles, dreaming with machines, the ethics of developing technologies and the role of optimism and empathy in envisioning alternative futures. 

Suzanne Treister: You wrote the other day that reading Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents (1998), given what’s been going on in Chile with the droughts and crime, made you really question how pessimistic or optimistic you are, or should be. It made me realise this is something I personally worry about a lot of the time – a constant undercurrent to everything I make as an artist. I feel like I naturally oscillate between the two, always looking out for dangerous paths and hypothesising better futures, but through my lifetime it’s been getting harder and harder to be optimistic. One has to dig deeper and deeper into all possibilities in order to find some light at the end of the tunnel. And at the centre of what I do is always the question of technology.

Patricia Domínguez: I believe that we live in a spiritual reality and at the end of the end, all will be fine. I hope. There’s an intelligence that can’t be touched and that can regenerate everything in new forms infinitely. But I’m also prepared to live in an expanding sense of apocalypse, of deep ecological and social mourning. Almost all the houses around here in Puchuncaví have been assaulted. Mine is probably next. The soil here is polluted with arsenic, which keeps getting worse with all the factories around. We live inside what has been called a ‘Sacrifice Zone’. Sadly, I don’t think things will get better until all the forms as we know them have collapsed.

I’m putting together a garden in a place that’s also devastated by dryness due to the privatisation of water. I wonder if all the efforts by the local community of renewing the native trees are worth it as the mega-drought permanence is imminent. I have a recurrent nightmare. A very subtle one. Nothing really happens apart from me in the future watching my garden die in front of my eyes because of the lack of water. This, which is small by comparison to what’s happening to the rest of the human planet, drains me a lot. And I wonder if I should allow that continuous draining or if I should gather all my enthusiasm and try to build better futures with more strength. At least the path on what to do to make things better is clear.

Going back to the point about pessimism and optimism, I guess your new tarot deck is half positive, half honest, with all the dark forces around that are at play? Is it more one half than the other? Is technology and how it is, and will be, utilised, a reflection of our inner states?

ST: Yes, my new tarot deck HEXEN 5.0 (2024) is an attempt to bring my previous tarot, HEXEN 2.0 FIG.1, up to date. It’s also a way for me to critically and historically explore 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-sociopolitical theory; contemporary countercultural and futuristic movements; and new directions in science fiction, towards proposed solutions for an ethical survival of the human race. Hopefully when it’s published it will be used as a learning tool for groups to discuss and envision positive alternative futures.

What are your thoughts about possible futures of technologies such as the internet and Web 3.0, the blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and the possibility of artificial general intelligence and the singularity? Do you think new technologies can solve the climate crisis? Clearly, it’s about which technologies, who’s using them and for what purpose, the ways they’re controlled and the collateral damage they may cause, but do you feel they could be more useful than destructive for the future of humanity and the planet?

PD: In the end, I believe that this climate crisis is more of a human crisis. We’ll solve it if we want to, with technology or without. I think that our technologies, organic and electrical, are mere extensions of our inner configurations. This possible positive use of technology will have to come from within. But now it’s escalating into unprecedented, dark places – like machine cruelty, with drones with zero empathy targeting people in genocides, for instance.

One of the ideas that stayed the most in my mind after my residency at CERN was quantum entanglement – the notion that we might have entangled particles all over the universe. Maybe that’s the reason I’ve been feeling so hypersensitive all my life – a symbolic hypersensitivity similar to some of Butler’s protagonists, who suffer from Hyper-empathy syndrome: the inability to observe someone in pain without sharing that pain, to debilitating effects. Since my first visit to CERN, I’ve been training myself to feel where my distant particles are and imagine that I can connect with them. I’m living my life, but I’m also feeling lots of other lives. I might have an entangled particle on the wheel of a car, but also in some of the people in Palestine, and I can’t stop feeling the suffering of the people there. On the other hand, I might have another particle in Andromeda, which gives me a broader understanding of time and the cosmic process. Where do you feel your entangled particles are? How open is your sense of being – where, or how, do you think you are you?

ST: Well, we all originate from exploding stars, not necessarily the same one though, and I often feel that I have entangled particles in a part of outer space; or perhaps in a Polish shaman living in a forest near the Ukrainian border; or in a line of Kabbalistic text; or inside my grandmother waiting in the queue for the gas chamber; or in my own childhood; or even in my old age, where I imagine looking backwards on my life. I’m often in the mountains, living in a hut, making do, or part of a few mountain stones, arranged by myself on a hillside into a small cairn, resting in the morning sun. I always worried about being an insect or wildflower, so easy to be trodden on by a clumsy human. Did you know that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians share a significant amount of genetic ancestry? It’s always sad to watch brothers fighting. I feel that too.

When I was at CERN, making The Holographic Universe Theory Of Art History (THUTOAH) FIG.2 I questioned the theoretical particle physicists about the holographic principle: the idea that two-dimensional versions of three-dimensional reality exist on a boundary somewhere out there, farther than we could travel in the universe. One of them did a watercolour of a person moving towards this boundary, becoming hot molecular code FIG.3.

PD: I feel the crossing in that watercolour! I made one of a person FIG.4 crossing an energetic boundary to homologise with a bird and gain its vision. This comes from the meditations I do to connect with energetic animals, who are my teachers.

Do you think that Hyper-empathy, plus the deep understanding that quantum physics offers, will help us rethink how we utilise technologies? And maybe finally get through this insular belief that societies have of only worrying about their own immediate territory, and instead think about what they encompass and what they’re really connected to. What is your favourite technology in your new deck, the one that gives you more faith?

ST: I guess that’s what I’m trying to encourage with HEXEN 5.0. For the tarot cards, I’m using alchemical drawing structures to describe these technologies and everything else, to entwine them into a mystical space where they become differently animated and resonant. There are amazing developing technologies for renewable energy and food production, but it’s the evolving new fields that inspire me with more hope for the future – such as spiritual ecology FIG.5, nexus thinking, astrocognition and some of the new countercultures of refusal and renewal, alongside new directions in science fiction, like solarpunk and hopepunk FIG.6. The people involved in these fields are some of the people we need to effectively direct, promote and make use of these technologies in ways that help us all. How do your thoughts about technology play out in your work and your imagery?

PD: I love your card about spiritual ecology. I’m excited to show it in Future Ours, the New York billboard project I’m co-curating.¹ It will be an incantation, a counterspell, to show that card in the public space!

I see my work as a technology itself – an artistic-spiritual-experimental one. I focus on tracing digital and spiritual relationships between living species in this increasingly corporate and violently oppressed cosmos. I guess it’s my way to not dissolve into despair. I reimagine these relationships and weave them together in a way that honours a more connected, planetary memory.

The cosmos is collective; it includes electrical technology too. I’ve invented my own rituals to survive in this system and transcend some of my own culturalisation. I see the way I use technologies as a sort of capitalist hack, as I re-choreograph and recode their possible uses in order to honour injured birds, evaporating water, dry bodies, ancient petroglyphs, songs for the water, healing plants, vegetal intelligence and terrestrial intelligence. I arrange video-shrines as new world configurations.

I perceive my practice as a stomach that digests the symbols and motifs of late capitalism, recoding them into myths of multispecies resistance. Once, a friend of mine, the curator Pablo José Ramirez, wrote about the inversions that my projects propose. Here is a quote that I love:

Following the traces of symbols and cultural objects as they enter digital grounds and come back to the physical world transformed, the movement that Patricia performs is similar to a material hacking exercise: if the digital corporatism operation implies turning what is alive into pixels, stripping it of all traces of planetary and ancestral memory, her movement is inversely opposite; she materializes what is digital, in order to connect it with memory.²

I feel like catching and materialising pixels of information coming to us from the sky. This new video and watercolour series I’m working on now, Tres Lunas Más Abajo FIG.7, is a spiritual pilgrimage to cutting-edge technologies. It’s a journey, a video prayer to broaden my cosmological sensor.

For your project at CERN, Scientific Dreaming (2022), I loved that you made the scientists dream. Can you show me one of their dreams? When I was there, I wanted to dream with the machines, but I only dreamt with my mom!

ST: I’m so excited hearing you talk about your work like this. It really resonates with how I’ve felt about my own, from early paintings, computer work and SOFTWARE project FIG.8 to the more recent SURVIVOR (F) FIG.9, The Escapist BHST (Black Hole Spacetime) (2018–19), Technoshamanic Systems (2020–23) and Kabbalistic Futurism FIG.10, in which I’m trying to imagine and connect transcendent scenarios of deep history, possible futures of technology, existence and understandings of the universe.

In Scientific Dreaming, I attempted to hypnotise a group of particle physicists to allow them to access other parts of their brain in the hope that they might come up with new solutions to the climate crisis. I led each scientist through a series of prompts, which resulted in them making a plot diagram for a science fiction short story that they would later write. I only told them at the end of the workshop that their drawing was for this purpose. One of the prompts was to ask them to describe a dream experienced by one of the characters they’d invented, which could be a dream they’d had themselves. Examples of their dreams were: flying close to the sun; walking in the Vatican; a robot dreaming of the person who built him; modelling future worlds; cycling by a river where the water is rising too high; travelling through the universe as an ethereal being; realising how to measure the cosmological constant in the universe; rivers full of fish; and a world of truth and justice. I created a diagram for the results of each prompt FIG.11.

PD: I see kittens, dreams of winning the lottery and ethereal travelling! It’s such a good exercise to have new thoughts and connections. For me, this is a crucial thing to do at the moment.

ST: I would love to hear more about your new video. Since leaving CERN, have you been able to dream with the machines?

PD: I haven’t been able to dream with machines yet, can you believe it? I keep dreaming about organic technologies and expanding my vision. I guess my biggest interest is to empower our bodies and their possible quantum functioning: the ultimate organic technology.

The new video is the second part of a personal inquiry, which I started in 2021, to broaden my understanding of the invisible. My previous video installation or ‘door’ Matrix Vegetal FIG.12 FIG.13 is the ‘vegetal door’ of the shamanic universe of plant intelligence, and this new work is the mirror ‘video door’, which explores mysticism and ritual while navigating fundamental science and cutting-edge technologies. The film is a quest of decoding and recoding how we understand reality and how we can shift perspectives.

In the video, the same actress from Matrix Vegetal – Claudia, my best friend from Chile – is guided by a bird-robot FIG.14, who leads her through the quantum worlds of CERN and the machine there that studies the smallest particles FIG.15; ancestral spaces in a petroglyph in the Atacama Desert, hidden under the sands; and the world’s most precise observatories at the ALMA and La Silla Observatories in the Atacama Desert FIG.16. She embraces different machines and technologies to acquire their capabilities. She longs for the vision and understanding that these objects can give her, so that she can broaden her cosmological sensor – her connection to the universe, galaxies, animals and the unknown. The video ends with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider telling her to go and dream, which ends up being the space where she can finally connect with her entangled particles FIG.17. I’m trying to embed the video with the experiences that most expanded my thinking during my own ‘pilgrimage’ to these places and concepts.

ST: To go back to where we started, I think we both now have entangled particles inside Butler’s Parable of the Talents, we both experience forms of Hyper-empathy and some kind of Lauren-Olamina-type drive to rescue the human race and restore the planet. Despite acknowledging the incalculable, complex horrors of present-day realities, we both believe we can contribute positively through art, through illuminating the deeper levels of connection and inhabiting the bad parts in order to make them better. And if only a few people are energised by our work, then we’re not totally delusional!

PD: Yes, if one person is touched by what we do it’s worth it. The end of Butler’s amazing novel was a bummer though, right? I was so curious to see how all the mess would unfold, and they ended up jumping into ships to colonise other planets.

ST: Yes totally, I was surprised by that part. But it was written in 1998, before Trumpian ideas of mining Mars and the Moon, before Foster + Partners had designed potentially realisable Mars habitats, and her fantasy was socially inclusive. I’m all for exploring outer space – it’s part of the inevitable human search for knowledge – but in non-colonialist, non-destructive ways. I’ve just finished another HEXEN 5.0 work FIG.18, which has a text about the perils of government and private space colonisation:

Postcolonial, planetary chauvinistic, imperialist development of space, extending coloniality into space in a perpetuation of settler colonialism and manifest destiny, by government space agencies, contractors, and wealthy elites affiliated with private corporations, leading to interplanetary contamination/destruction, possible extinction of indigenous extraterrestrial life, and endangering of any extraterrestrial first contact.

What is your feeling about humanity entering the cosmos?

PD: I think we should wait until we fix our mess here, and learn to live together before putting a foot in outer space. If not, it will be controlled, as you say, by governments, power and greed. I feel we’re not worthy to go into space yet. For now, we can travel with our imaginations across different dimensions, learning to open the portals here on Earth.

ST: Yes, I totally understand that position, but this situation is already happening. It’s unlikely anyone can stop governments and corporations developing their extractivist colonialist space programmes, just as it’s unlikely anyone can stop the tech community developing more and more sophisticated AI. These people have power and are obsessively driven. But what we can do is imagine and advocate for inclusive, ecologically safe and ethically driven alternatives in these fields.

For example, my designs for psychedelic spaceships FIG.19 and dresses for space travel, although purely dysfunctional and imaginary, are meant to be ways of suggesting this direction, like a fantasy of countercultural space exploration, which was maybe more what Butler was getting at? It doesn’t necessarily mean we have to go out there, but imagining positive ways of being out there is important somehow.

There are other issues, though. There is the emerging field of astrocognition, which considers possible changes in our brains, thinking and belief systems in extraterrestrial environments. There is also Liu Cixin’s idea of the dark forest in his science-fiction novel of the same name: the idea that civilisations from other planets may be hostile and that we should perhaps hide our presence in the universe, adopting a so-called ‘dark forest strategy’.

PD: I woke up today thinking that maybe the universe is the one that needs to learn to be at peace with itself? We’re just minuscule parts of it, trespassed by these strong forces. Who really knows what is happening outside? I think that your new tarot deck will offer a total update of information, new sciences and the strong forces that are at play in the universe.

And, yes, I agree that we can hack the system from the inside and advocate for new uses of technology. In my work, I’ve made bio-prospecting drones cry alongside indigenous vases for the extracted land FIG.20; prayed for the quartz that is being mined for the processing chips in our computers in Quartz, cactus and silicon chip meditation (2020); imagined an LED light woman who can neutralise stressed robots and liberate their rational mind using medicinal plans FIG.21; and asked to absorb the pixelated vision of a blinded police drone so I can expand my own, so I can imagine new futures in the cracks of this era.

I wish that we had come to terms with the ethics of the new AI technologies before they were developed. We have to consider everything – all species, the planet, water, soil, the universe, all peoples, the resources they used and their biases – along with the immense amount of electrical energy that AI is consuming. Lots of people are pushing to challenge those who create and programme new forms of AI. Yesterday, I gave a talk about the relationship of my work to the planet and technology, which was shown at SIGGRAPH 2024, a tech conference in the United States. There was discussion about the fact that engineers are designing things like NFTs or the Metaverse, but they keep falling apart because they have no content or criticality. They don’t have a root to the Earth, to life. So, this year they’re inviting artists, peace advocators and people from the healthcare system to help them advocate for everything that’s left behind after this brutal digitalisation of life.

With that equation activated, we can then programme AI to help us take better care of the planet. I know it sounds totally utopian. Talking about utopias, I recited to them the technologies we invented for the Museum of Ethics and Interplanetary Technologies:

Technologies for distributing the most healing plants around the universe between civilizations

Decodification of the languages of the cosmos

Technology to activate unused and dormant cells in the brain

Unlimited interplanetary energy sources through dark matter/dark energy invocations

Interplanetary species empathy exchange technology for experiencing each other’s position

Ethical assessment technology for intergalactic welfare.

Seeing how corporations control AI, and most of all, technological innovations, I’m much more interested in learning about spiritual, healing and artistic technologies – ‘technologies with no hardware’ – and consulting the intelligence of the planet. I know you also draw on this, and also cosmic information. It’s crucial to find and sustain this direct access to reality, new thoughts and techniques as a counterspell.

ST: I agree, and it was amazing to make that poster with you for Transmediale FIG.22, inventing together those technologies for non-invasive and peaceful interplanetary coexistence for the Museum of Ethics and Interplanetary Technologies.³

I can’t wait to see your new video. I know I’m going to find it energising! I wonder what it would feel like to look back on our work, if it still exists, a hundred years in the future?