The Cyclist and the Mushroom is a sound installation based on the meeting between a cyclist and a car and explores the different worlds inhabited by both at the moment of impact. It takes as its points of reference the writings of Terence McKenna, and in particular his interest in the meetings of different worlds through his experimentation with the hallucinogen DMT, and of the English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, who acknowledged that ‘the universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose’. The worlds in question are the single- minded world of the cyclist, the distractedness in the cabin of the car, and the police report that attempts to make sense of it all, much in the way road markings attempt to bring order to the chaos and keep these worlds apart while also allowing them to work in conjunction with each other.
The sound installation revolves around a sonic roundabout and includes a text that visitors are invited to print out, incorporating into this circular procession the printer’s own circular, but fatally distracted sonic route; bringing the production of text into potential collision with other ‘queer universes’.
The work includes a performative activation of the installation, which is based on writers’ written anecdotes, taken from the internet, on how they write, as well as Hindu numerology and the particular numerological time structure of the virtual environment of the computer game interjected by other concerns about words and texts.
The stage for the talk was provided by the physical space of the artists’ installation shown in the exhibition into whose soundtrack the talk was embedded, borrowing the installation’s pace and circularity.
Computer, two speakers, printer.
The 44 letters are heard individually through 44 separate speaker channels in the gallery, activating with a 3 minute delay, becoming a looped cacophony of unregistered complaint.
