To walk through each chamber of Suzanne Treister’s Prophetic Dreaming at Modern Art Oxford is to experience an artistic practice evolving in tandem with four decades of technological advancement. Curated in chronological order from Treister’s beginnings with oil paint through to her complex multimedia narrative projects of the 90s - late 2000s and her current exploration of the modern internet’s digital landscape, what leaps out most to the observer is Treister’s ability to marry each emergent technology with expansive, conceptual imaginings of their potential - for good, and for ill.

This is enshrined from the start in one of Treister’s earlier works, Venus on TV on the Moon, a miniature oil painting depicting an image of the goddess on a TV screen sitting huge atop the moon’s surface. It combines trademarks of Treister featured throughout the exhibition; the juxtaposition of ancient custom and modern interfaces, a scope that verges on the intergalactic, and a sense of humour that plays with logical extremity. The first section contains easily some of my favourite works in this collection, in particular a series of beautifully crafted and darkly humorous floppy discs on which the observer can potentially download, among other things, ‘your vile questions answered’, ‘interactive torture chambers’, or what is implied to be a whole living cat. The fonts are all in hand drawn calligraphic type, again bringing together the sense of ancient tome and modern tech.

Similarly, Treister’s Fictional Video Game Stills series exploits the needlepoint effect of Amiga software to create something of a modern tapestry, each frame containing a still from an imaginary game she has constructed. Instead of your standard 8-bit quest, ‘players’ are confronted with questions about the nature of paradise, glitching error messages and absurdist deconstructions of video game tasks. It has a playfulness and visual immediacy that characterises some of the strongest works across the exhibition.

Treister seems to have a near infinite capacity for worldbuilding that allows her to create speculative fictions that are almost staggering in their complexity, and nowhere is this clearer than in the second room, housing Treister’s decades-long project Time Traveling with Rosalind Brodsky, and her series of alchemical drawings chronicling the militaristic roots of our current digital era in Hexen 2.0. The former charts the adventures and research of Brodsky Treister’s intertemporal alter-ego, as an employee of the fictional Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality.

There’s a tongue in cheek Hitchhiker’s Guide tone to a few pieces, in particular Brodsky’s chrome outfit complete with bucket helmet, or a time travel cookery show in which she artfully uses reversed footage to ‘deconstruct’ a Black Forest gateau to get the base ingredients to make pierogi. Hanging on the wall are posters for the interplanetary tour for her band, The Satellites of Lvov, alongside diagrams of her research at IMATI developing mind control technologies and devices to communicate with the universe. The melding of traditional legend and modern capability returns again in her attempt to engineer a modern Golem. It has the same odd sense of Disney’s Tomorrowland future nostalgia, but there’s a darkness beneath it, tying into Treister’s own family history of the Holocaust; what would you fix if you could turn back time? How much of what you’re doing now may one day contribute to later atrocities?

That said, as a first-time observer, I was often overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information and shifts in tone there were to take in. There are pieces where Treister seems so absorbed in her own narrative-building that she leaves the viewer behind. So intricate and dense are her Hexen diagrams, I’d have to spend several hours going through every connection drawn within them (and given the exhibition’s emphasis on the accuracy of her predictions, I can help but feel that if you write things down at this volume, statistically you’re probably going to get something right eventually).

Sometimes this even extends to the explanatory notes, which can read as a sort of sound bath of futurist terminology eg. “Whether manifestations of a survivor of the human race on Earth, in space, or a new planet or parallel universe, or of an artificial superintelligence (ASI), SURVIVOR (F) presents visions of a post-futuristic sublime, charting an existential imagery of potential human/non-human/agency/non-agency, of the psychedelic consciousness of Survivor (F)”. Again, this was meant to explain the piece.

Perhaps the impenetrability is the point - much in the same way I can’t fluently read complex code, I may not need to take in every thread of Treister’s modern alchemical incantations to know their intended effect on the world, and the elaborateness of their composition is impressive in and of themselves. But my favourite pieces of hers are those with more of a clarity of purpose, ones that make the observer a more direct participant in the artwork. I was especially drawn to footage from her performance piece The Drone That Filmed The Opening of Its Own Exhibition, in which a drone was programmed to monitor and surveillance gallery visitors at Annely Juda Fine Art before landing on its plinth while a video of its recorded footage played alongside. Similarly, her NATO series reimagines NATO’s four digit codification system as a tool of museum curation, painting watercolour diagrams to accompany each item. Each is a confrontational reflection of how easily the military and surveillance state can be normalised within everyday culture, and by existing in the museum space, we become its victim.

Then I entered the final room and my heart sank when I found a significant part of Treister’s return to her Hexen series involved multiple pieces created by generative AI. It sticks out like a sore thumb from Treister’s other works that so clearly show her own process - the same too-glossy sheen, on-the-nose imagery and out-of-whack structure we’ve come to recognise from programmes like these. Treister claims her use of AI in this project is an attempt to critically examine it and use it for better futures, but I didn’t buy it when Jarvis Cocker tried it on the new Pulp album and I’m not buying it here.