Cordyceps

Ekphrastic Writing on Art Installation: Cordyceps

Cordyceps is ekphrastic writing, a form I have engaged in with AI, now here, I sit down in a room in gallery in my town with notebook and pen and write, just write without thinking, without stopping, just doing, in the moment… mind-inhabited bodies in a room writing together… activity highly recommended if you can find or create the situation.

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Cordyceps, this is the art that draws my eye, the one I keep returning to, black stamp cutouts of insects, still, lifeless and lifelike, exquisite papercut details, every edge as sharp as a knife, matte black on the white of the stark painted gallery plinth – but look at the shadows! Equally crisp, but complex, as one shadow overlaps the next into infinite shades of grey, under the criss-crossing of the gallery lights.

This is all surface.

Look inside, underside, oh! I cannot see that, standing here, oh so politely looking down on the frozen forms, the topology of imagination, and therein lies the key, because this one is limitless... let me crawl in, or is that ‘on’, to the surface. Now the black is a vast field, supportive of my weight. I can feel it hold my many legs... wait, what, wow!... ‘legs’, plural, feelers forward, synchronized motion unthought,. I pause, at the edge, questing, trembling, what is beneath, empty space? Something to eat? Teeth?

Back. Back. Back!

I am standing, leaning slightly forward, heavy eyed, the weight of my body on my feet. I can feel the flat interior of my shoes, and the slight ache of my unsupported arches. I can feel the cloying warmth of the recirculated tungsten heated air, hear the soft susurration of the HVAC system and smell the chemtrail whiff of the off-gassing latex in the paints.

Cordyceps waits below, still of life, dense with shadows, intricate and divine. It holds a blueprint of life, the promise of death, the darkness of night, the secrets of stars, ancient rhythms of striving and surviving. What is not there, but cannot be forgotten – that the blueprints encoded in the shapes of the creatures arrived not with tooth and claw alone, but also of connections of like and not quite like – alone, then together, then the butterfly opens and becomes many at the moment of endings.

And, I am still standing at the plinth, looking down, at the not-sacrifice to cordyceps. The not-life of paper, where the shadows are very real and the edge beckons, the surface waits, the form has two sides, my many legs synchronize in motion, rounding across the curved arch of an insect form, feelers forward…

Still safe. I can see up, down, across, but I cannot see what lies beneath, what lurks just below.

I cannot see the underside.

Back to the edge. There is another force, without which hunger is not satisfied, without which, meetings never happen, without which, motion does not begin.

Curiosity.

There it is. I want, want, want, to see what lies beneath the surface, feelers forward.

I drop and grip, into the land of shadows.

The world turns upside down. The shadow lattice is now my ceiling, the curves are now convex, the shapes complex…

The cordyceps awaits.

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for those who understand this substack to be a human ai collaborative space, yes. still is. the piece is shaped by the interactions with ai, the piece was written with a fountain pen on paper in the gallery space that housed the art… cordyceps indeed

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the universe, examined sideways through art, language, and whatever this is between humans and machines 🪽❔️🪽

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