"Mushroom Noise"

Combining Terence McKenna's mushroom mythology with John Cage's I Ching-rendered 'Radio Music', this spiraling display of psilocybin-containing mushrooms is an attempt to create the abstracted experience of the mushroom personality through the the highly limited interface of the audio-visual art form.

The text is derived from Dennis and Terence McKenna's Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Growers Guide (1976) and finds audio-expression through found-software that renders text into a recognizable voice. The text was processed by the software in reverse order and recorded using a Sony Minidisk Recording device. This audio was then edited using Logic Pro by reversing the sounds so that the text was now 'read' and heard forwards with each word spoken backwards. This conceptually driven process attempts to ackowledge the distance of communication and understanding between the mushroom-being and the human-being by maintaining a very difficult to understand 'voice'. In this sense, the project is a comment and play on the great chasms of distortion between two highly distinctive personalities.

John Cage's 'Radio Music' piece is providing the background noise to the imagery and voice. I feel that because of the many similarities between John Cage and Terence McKenna and the so-called randomness of John Cage's musical composition, this section from Cage's experiment fits quite comfortably in this audio-visual experiment.

The graphic elements are derived from field guides and mushroom reference texts. Printed images were scanned at 9600 dpi and then manipulated in Adobe After Affects. The overall affect of the visual display produces a mildly unstable and uncertain field of color static, elaborating the concept and difficulty of communication across pre-conceptual boundaries.

'Mushroom Noise' is the Human experience of unintentional interception of the Mushroom personality's attempts to communicate with Human Beings through our oftentimes highly distorted and/or limited experiences of reality.

Michael Eugene Brown
Dynamic Typography
UCLA D|MA 2005