Level Up

Reading Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson gave me the impetus to buy my first computer. By 1991, I had heard that you could get relatively cheap computers, so one Saturday afternoon I bought a Commodore Amiga and started working with this software called Deluxe Paint II to make my first videogame still. This idea had been brewing with my video game paintings that I had been making for several years, but after that I gave up painting more or less overnight.

The year before I bought my first computer, I’d met a guy who worked in a digi- tal graphics design company. He told me he had a computer that could paint, and the next day I got a demonstration. It was the first time I’d held a mouse and used a graphics editor with a toolbox. It was a really magical experience. I moved my hand and this bright coloured line flew across the screen, like a big arc. Suddenly I was controlling these amazing, luminous colours on this digital interface. I think I felt a massive paradigm shift at that moment.

It was a sense of ecstasy and a sense of panic – almost like a disembodied, transcendent feeling; something quite spiritual. In that first experience, I felt the potential embedded in this technology and a need to make work on computers that would explore not just the aggressive side of video games and their potential militaristic uses, but the multiple possible trajectories and embodiments of new technologies. Because technology is invented by human beings and it can be as complex as human beings are, it just depends who is using it and for what purpose. That’s always been my dream, to somehow navigate technology both critically and holistically.

^{Suzanne Treister is an artist who lives in London. A selection of Fictional Videogame Stills is included in Electric Dreams, Tate Modern, 28 November 2024 – 1 June 2025.}

^{A full version of this article is published as an interview with Val Ravaglia in Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, forthcoming with Tate Publishing.}