Lost in a Virtual Wilderness

In 1991, artist Suzanne Treister created a series of liminal images using an Amiga. 34 years later, I became enthralled by these in a world that's full of surreal computer generated imagery. 

I don't understand art in the traditional sense, but I do understand video games. I came across this artists work in a weekly newsletter called Bathysphere (check it out) and I had never seen a crossover quite like this. In the newsletter, an image that I can only describe as a needlepoint video game screenshot glitching out jumped off the page and asked me a question that I didn't have a satisfying answer to: ARE YOU DREAMING? 

At first glance, this looks like a slightly edited AI generated image circa 2024, but there is something that is so distinctly human in it. If you understand art and you can put your finger on it, please tell me. I can see the mark of humanity on this screenshot, despite it being completely digitally rendered. That humanity is immediately juxtaposed on a brutally digital rigidity; geometric borders, squares and rectangles placed in a way that appears like a UI.  I really wish I could explain why this image was so striking to me. At this point in the blogpost, I was hoping I could rubber duck it out of me, but at this point, I might have to just accept that it's one of those things that we can't know. 

That's enough musing, the story behind these pieces is pretty interesting. The collection, called Fictional Video Game Stills started with Suzanne's love of games growing up, and applying them to larger concepts.

 From the mid to late 1980s I spent a lot of time hanging around videogame arcades in London. I started to think about the games, their structures, their objectives, their themes, their addictiveness. I started to consider their cultural subtexts, antecedents, the effect they may have on society and how they might develop and connect to other mechanisms, developments and fantasies or projections of the future. From 1989 I started making paintings about them and in January 1991 I bought an Amiga computer and made a series of fictional videogame stills using Deluxe Paint II. 

The works are meant to give a glimpse into the "parallel universes and alternate existences from daily life". These feel like the player wandered into the back rooms of the internet, and found themselves poking around in that alternate existence that lives just beyond the veil. There is just enough human design to give the viewer the idea of what is going on, but not enough to stave off the feeling of uneasiness, as if this is a glitch or bug that shouldn't have been triggered. 

I strongly recommend checking out the pieces for yourself, which you can find here. This post is experimenting with talking about artistic works in a more meaningful way, so if it felt meandering and incoherent, its because it was. However, these pieces had an effect on me, and even if I can't quantify it, I wanted to share it.