Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky

Suzanne Treister began her futuristic time travelling with Rosalind Brodsky in 1995, a radical departure from her earlier work as a painter, as she began to experiment with new technologies. This sequence of works developed across video/performance, the internet, CD-Rom, posters and in a range of drawing and documentation follows the actions of a classic modern science-fiction heroine, part-detective, part-scientist. Brodsky's research work on the construction of a range of sonic weapons for the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality at Cape Canaveral (the former home of NASA) in 2028/29 forms the underlying narrative of Operation Swanlake. As Brodsky and her assistant Varda Blum research the black hole, Cygnus X-1, links to many different Swan Lakes emerge in opera, ornithology, Battle Class Soviet destroyers, alchemical drawings and retirement homes in Florida. As in all engaging science fiction narratives, Brodsky investigates the past through time-travel and detective work with an aim for her future: namely, developing a range of sonic weapons capable of broadcasting in space. On different temporal journeys, Brodsky and her fellow time-traveller Golem move through Alaska, Bavaria, Leningrad, Kleve, the Catskills, Berlin, Ukraine and Titusville, Florida. Framed by the two superpowers' struggle to gain military and scientific supremacy in the space-race during the Cold War, but set in a not-too-distant future where time-travel is an experiment of an equally secret military institution, Treister redeploys these futuristic obsessions and her institutional critique to explore and create connections at a semiotic and visual level between often divergent histories and contemporary politics. A fantasy and a dream, Operation Swan Lake still illuminates contemporary consciousness in an information overloaded and historically-amnesiac society. Katy Deepwell