Can you Open the Box?
In 1991 Treister purchased an Amiga computer (an early desktop computer released in 1985) and began to create fictional video game stills using a graphics editor software called Deluxe Paint II. She photographed these stills directly from the computer screen. Can You Open the Box? (1992) is part of her first photographic series using this method. 91 this series Treister explains, “The effect of the photographs perfectly reproduced the highly pixelated, raised needlepoint effect of the Amiga screen image. Conceptually this means of presentation was also appropriate in that it made it seem like I had gone into a videogame arcade and photographed the games there, lending authenticity to the fiction.” The Amiga computer was an early personal computer released in 1985. Treister’s early experimentation with this new media suggests her pioneering attitude towards developing digital technologies for art in the 1990s.
