In 1998, I began a 25-year thought experiment called Tingleguts, inspired by my life journey and a psychedelic trip in Amsterdam during the Gay Games’ opening festivities. A handful of Philosopher’s Stone truffles revealed enigmatic and powerful messages, including the idea that radically embracing chaos, randomness, and loss of control in my artistic process could lead to exciting results. Rolling the dice to decide my next move felt more prophetic at the time than a guidebook or set of instructions.
By the time I earned my BFA at the University of Michigan in 2000, my Amsterdam experience distilled into a central question: Can one generate synchronicities? Having grown up in and escaped a radical Christian fundamentalist doomsday group as a closeted gay teen, I spent years deconstructing that religion, fascinated by alternative belief systems. Long before it was mainstream, I suspected life paths weren’t controlled by angels or gods but shaped by our thoughts and beliefs, which coalesce into meaningful coincidences seemingly beyond likely or statistically probable. I began using my artistic practice to explore this.
After moving to Washington, DC, in 2000, I deepened my work as a documentary photographer. Inspired by the eclectic trash near the Capitol, I launched the LANDSAT-1 series, capturing photographs of discarded objects left behind by strangers. Each week, I spent hours documenting these remnants, embracing the randomness of their discovery. Over time, I amassed tens of thousands of overhead photos using my Nikon camera, mimicking the perspective of the satellite for which the series is named. Interestingly, I later learned that the LANDSAT-1 satellite was launched on my birthdate—a serendipitous connection that added another layer of meaning to the project.
This work evolved into a unique method of collecting environmental data and formed an unexpected link between me and the United States’ earth-observing satellite. The satellite itself, in turn, shares a name with Landsat Island, a small but significant landmass discovered by Canadian scientist Betty Fleming. While examining photographs shared with the Canadian government by the United States, Fleming spotted a tiny speck in the waters off the Labrador Coast. This previously uncharted island not only expanded Canada’s total area by several thousand square kilometers, but also necessitated the redrawing of international water boundaries to reflect its existence.
With no set endpoint, I kept adding square-cropped images to the LANDSAT-1 collection until technological limitations introduced randomness and paused the process—my desktop couldn’t handle the file size. Letting coincidence guide me again, I suggested to the process that I limit what I do next to only include the content of one of the thousands of images. The exhilaration of releasing the weight of determining what potential content I would sift into my net was matched by the realization of what I would commit to do with that image next.
LANDSAT-1 (2000 - present) Photography
Premonitions (2023) Watercolor on paper
Years earlier, as a tech-obsessed undergrad, I discovered PC Stitch software in an Office Depot randomly, which converts digital images into cross-stitch patterns by matching pixel colors to embroidery floss shades. It generates a black-and-white pattern for stitching, with symbols indicating exact positions and colors. The repetitive grid, aided by cotton aida cloth marked with 1-inch segments, helps ensure precision while building the image stitch by stitch. I had kept the CD-ROM around despite never knowing what I would do with it until long after I’d paused taking photos for the LANDSAT-1 project.
After coming across the software unexpectedly in a drawer I was cleaning out, the idea struck me to use one image from LANDSAT-1, to create a stunning 22” x 28” cross-stitch, the largest I believed I could actually complete while being audacious. The idea of spending years recreating a relatively crude 352 x 448-pixel JPEG—produced in under a second—through this painstaking process of hand-stitching over 150,000 Xs into a textile felt appropriately absurd. Combining this traditionally "gendered" craft with digital technology promised a fascinating outcome, even before I knew what the image would be.
Sitting in my studio, looking away from the screen and out the window of my second floor digital studio at the Howard Theatre directly across the street, I slid the mouse around on the desk until there was no way I could know where the cursor it controlled had landed. Like I imagine a child who celebrated their birthday opening a gift, something I never did and that in part informs my fascination with belief systems, I slowly turned toward the computer with exhilaration in search of the tiny arrow and the image with which I was about to spend so much time.
Rather than come to rest on the fluorescent orange plastic parachuter, red comb, green Mountain Dew bottle, or any other of a host of interesting things, my stomach sank when I saw the tiny arrow had landed on one of the least compelling visuals I would have hoped not to see. The feeling was similar to what I imagine losing big at the roulette tables might feel, having only lost a small amount playing them once I won back the next day, to the dollar, before quitting gambling after one try in Las Vegas.
One early morning my fate had been unwittingly sealed. Walking from the rented condo I lived in at the time near U and 12th Street NW, I set out west on U to eventually wind through Dupont Circle toward my office in the International Square building, a few blocks from the White House. Still very close to home, I had just crossed 16th Street NW on the south side of U. I was in front of Warren Brown’s CakeLove pastry cafe when I spotted a ball of audio cassette tape settled in the gutter to my right. The iridescent knot caught my eye as I recognized it as the same kind of magnetic audio tape that usually was wound up tightly inside cassettes that I recorded myself making music onto as a kid in the 80s.
Possessions I saved money for as an 11-15-year-old include a RadioShack handheld tape recorder, a Hitachi dual-deck boom box, and a Casio SK-1 mini sampling keyboard. But when I took the photograph of the shimmering ball wound up in the gutter, I hadn’t had time to fully think that through. Like thousands of others, it was an eye-catching site and thought-provoking ephemeral content. But its nature, as an image with which I would spend almost 2000 hours, was even slightly depressing. The color palette is 68 shades of mostly gray, earth tones, muted blues and greens, and flecks of red and pink. For someone having a personal love for using extravagant amounts of color, it was quite underwhelming. I didn’t realize until I was finished with it how much it resembles the paintings I was producing at the time, but only in crude detail and sepia shades I typically wouldn’t use.
To counter the tedious process of handwork, I added to my meditation practice by exploring physical making as a series of meditations. Something that became abundantly clear as I got into the process is that millions of different thoughts would have gone by about myriad things by the time the cross-stitch was finished unless disciplined with intention and focused on the question of synchronicity. Therefore, I determined to spend as much time as possible simply asking the work what it meant that I was with this image of cassette tape. Why is this idea of audio tape significant? Initially, it was because I resisted the image and wished it had been another. Eventually though, it became a sincere openness to potential significance in the contents of the image and a willingness to flow with it without attempting to comprehend or long too much to know why.
A few months after the cross-stitch you are about to see was finished, and before it would be exhibited along with LANDSAT-1 and dozens of other works in my two-person show with Tim Pittman at Project 4 Gallery titled There’s No Time For This, I was on another walk home from the office but without my camera. I always preferred walking home over any metro ride available. This particular evening, my crisscrossing of Dupont Circle toward home brought me to walking north along 16th Street NW in front of the Temple of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry and up to my street, T, where I walked the sidewalk on the north side eastward.
Still blocks from my place, in the dusk that was just setting, I could see ahead of me that a couple of bags of garbage had been destroyed, and the contents strewn all over the sidewalk and my path. Among the many belief systems I’d thoroughly studied by this evening were some related to the dawning of conspiracy theory thinking that was spreading within the online world. One secretive group appeared so frequently at the center of such conspiracy theories that I had already devoured several books about them written by those with purported firsthand experience. Pop fiction from Dan Brown had just framed the group again as master-manipulators pulling the strings of power hidden in plain sight in Washington, DC.
My surname McLellan is of Scottish origin and is an Anglicized form of the Gaelic name "Mac Gille Fhaolain," which translates to "son of the servant of (Saint) Faolán." The name Faolán itself is derived from "faol," meaning "wolf" or "little wolf." Rather than finding my Scottish lineage entangled with the Freemasons however, I had years prior to this evening learned that the group is not of Scottish origin and likely selected the name for the air of prestige it lent their endeavors at the time, as much as for any authentic connection to a lineage of adherents with ties to a form of the belief system from Scotland.
Walking by their Temple minutes earlier brought up memories of seeing Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle in parts at the Detroit Institute of Arts and on extremely uncomfortable theater seats at the Guggenheim. His exploitation of the secretive mystique of the fraternal order turned into film, sculpture, and installations inspired me as I was amidst the work of LANDSAT-1. It was with a head full of knowledge about the group therefore that I eventually stood still over the mess of things scattered about on the walk home. Within seconds I started to remove my bag, knowing I’d just made an incredible discovery simply by taking a couple glancing looks.
Because of my familiarity with them and having just seen the Temple, I recognized the words and symbols embossed in gold on navy blue linen on a number of vintage books. One look inside one, and within two pages, the group forbids reading on unless the holder is an operative of the fraternity.
Beyond all that in significance, however, is the cache of nearly five dozen audio cassette tapes among the mess. One by one I picked them up to find they were recorded onto and labeled with names and dates spanning four decades. Sony 90-minute tapes, Maxell 60-minute tapes, Radio Shack 120-minute blank tapes that had all been recorded onto. The titles of the speakers named in ballpoint pen on the paper inside some gave away the identity of the group further. With a sense of urgency and a little foreboding, I laid my bag open on the ground and began tossing the most eye-catching materials into it, including all the tapes.
With looks over my shoulders and around as I rushed home, I was already beginning to feel the paranoia just for having them in my bag that I recognized attended so many conspiracy theories about the group. With the coffee table moved to the end of the living room to make space on the rug for the contents of my bag to be carefully dumped, I was unaware of how deep the rabbit hole I’d unintentionally walked into was, nor how long it would take to extricate myself from it. With a shelf full of books that included half a dozen specifically about them and the mystical underpinnings of their order in a room up the stairs, on the table, I lined up the found tapes chronologically based on the dates each was inscribed with.
Ancient Methods (Part One) (2023) Audio cassettes, origami box geometry design, watercolor on paper, scoring and folding
Sly Busker "Let Us Now Cage Shameless Men" (2023) Original zines and self-portrait with AI intervention
A group I had learned was apparently one of the most secretive, powerful, dangerous, and feared organizations on the planet sat captured in recordings made during private meetings that stretched from 1968 to 1998. Nearly 150 hours of men speaking about things behind closed doors in private had been liberated by technology to land in the public sphere and bounce into my hands. I checked the lock on my front door and moved the tapes to my studio up stairs for the first of a series of safe-keeping and self-preservationist maneuvers designed to preserve the recordings while distancing myself enough from them to feel at all safe.
By 2017, I had stored the tapes in various secure locations, unpacking their contents and processing my own relationship to the discovery in search for ways that I could securely manage it. It took me only a period of days after finding the tapes originally, to recognize that after a few years of incredibly hard work and discipline, I had seemingly been able to generate a synchronicity as evinced by the extended symbolism of cassette tapes. I’d asked reality to speak through my process, and acts of randomness had aligned me with tape in a gutter, photo of tape, cross-stitch of tape, cache of extremely controversial rare tapes found. If ever there was a bolt of lightning as a response, this was it. And the icing on top is that the tapes were found on T Street no less.
Below is the series of images grouped into five sections that outline the step-by-step process by which I manifested the bizarre situation. Each of the groups pairs with instructions that anyone at home can use to generate their own conspiracy theory, fueled by the discovery of their own authentic objects of conspiratorial contemplation, like the tapes. Wilted Unicorn’s DIY Conspiracy Theory Home Starter Kit (Intense) both documents and distorts. It illustrates and obscures the existence of the tapes by embedding them in wildly imaginative fictional narratives and IRL interventions. Through creative sleight-of-hand, the tapes are being secretly reintroduced into public space, embedded in a series of beeswax sculptures and hidden. Meanwhile, their discovery and contents are kept as the source for a world of factual fiction intended to cause speculation over their existence.
When I brought the tapes to SVA, I did so with the intention to learn how to build the story I intended to develop around them into the kernel of an authentic conspiracy theory and an experimental performance work based on that process. With truth and facts long since well under attack, I knew that my account was too unbelievable in a good way, and would pose many challenges to myself and those who would engage with my stories and the artifacts attending them. With the cross-stitch hung in my studio and the tapes often at hand in the locker for those who wished to listen, in earnest I described during crits my belief that I had generated a synchronicity of such dramatic proportions with my own mind that, were a Bible collected for the first time today, it meets any standard for inclusion based on miraculousness.
Such claims were made, regardless of venue, in acts of performance where I leveraged my experience knocking on doors and proselytizing as a kid with my parents and our magazines to intentionally persuade or dissuade others as to the authenticity of my account. Always using true stories and truth intentionally to extremes, I shared this experience and many others I’ve lived that are nearly equally unbelievable, specifically to foster an image of myself with others wherein they might believe I was inclined to fanciful thinking, telling tall tales, or worse, outright lies.
Centerfold "Let Us Now Cage Shameless Men" (2023) Marker drawing on paper printed as centerfold in original zine
Wilted Unicorn's DIY Conspiracy Theory Home Starter Kit (Intense) 2024
Part One of the five-part instruction set includes thousands and thousands of images documenting trash spotted along walks in DC, the one photo randomly selected from them, and the hand-made cross-stitch painstakingly made from that photo over a period of about two years.
Wilted Unicorn's DIY Conspiracy Theory Home Starter Kit (Intense) 2024
Part Two of the five-part instruction set includes these images documenting a discovered cache of bizarre live recordings and their subsequent concealment within individual origami boxes made from watercolors originally generated for other purposes.
Part Two of the five-part instruction set includes these images documenting a discovered cache of bizarre live recordings and their subsequent concealment within individual origami boxes made from watercolors originally generated for other purposes.
Wilted Unicorn's DIY Conspiracy Theory Home Starter Kit (Intense) 2024
Part Three of the five-part instruction set includes these images of the various projects that cropped up along walks where objects like beads, personal photographs, digital media storage devices, and wireless headphones were routinely come upon lost on the ground and collected.
Part Three of the five-part instruction set includes these images of the various projects that cropped up along walks where objects like beads, personal photographs, digital media storage devices, and wireless headphones were routinely come upon lost on the ground and collected.
BeadRustlers: The Museum of the Lost-n-Found Beads of Manhattan (2018 to present)
Above is a string of found beads that is over 55 feet long. It is less than half the total collection of found beads that I have gathered from the streets of Manhattan since 2018. In 2024, I began the process of documenting and sharing the discoveries through my BeadRustlers account on Instagram. Additionally, I am ready to activate a project where I allow small groups to join me as I beadrustle around Manhattan.
Above is a string of found beads that is over 55 feet long. It is less than half the total collection of found beads that I have gathered from the streets of Manhattan since 2018. In 2024, I began the process of documenting and sharing the discoveries through my BeadRustlers account on Instagram. Additionally, I am ready to activate a project where I allow small groups to join me as I beadrustle around Manhattan.
BeadRustlers: The Museum of the Lost-n-Found Beads of Manhattan (2024)
A collection of beads found on the ground around Manhattan has been growing steadily since 2018 and now numbers in the thousands. The discovery that so many lost beads litter the streets and sidewalks inspired a "beadrustling" tour guide performance art entity BeadRustlers, where small groups join the world's leading expert beadrustler, Wilted Unicorn, on walks through Manhattan on the hunt for lost beads. BeadRustlers' activities quickly recovered so many lost beads from gutters, soccer fields, and cross-walks that the Museum of the Lost-n-Found Beads of Manhattan (MuLoFoBeMa, pronounced muh-luh-fuh-bay-may) was formed to manage and house the collection, now maintained in the El Barrio neighborhood of the island. By way of BeadRustlers' social media presence on Instagram, the project shares regular documentary photographs of lost beads found in situ, before being snatched up for preservation, cataloging, and inclusion in one of the museum's notoriously provocative traveling exhibits.
A collection of beads found on the ground around Manhattan has been growing steadily since 2018 and now numbers in the thousands. The discovery that so many lost beads litter the streets and sidewalks inspired a "beadrustling" tour guide performance art entity BeadRustlers, where small groups join the world's leading expert beadrustler, Wilted Unicorn, on walks through Manhattan on the hunt for lost beads. BeadRustlers' activities quickly recovered so many lost beads from gutters, soccer fields, and cross-walks that the Museum of the Lost-n-Found Beads of Manhattan (MuLoFoBeMa, pronounced muh-luh-fuh-bay-may) was formed to manage and house the collection, now maintained in the El Barrio neighborhood of the island. By way of BeadRustlers' social media presence on Instagram, the project shares regular documentary photographs of lost beads found in situ, before being snatched up for preservation, cataloging, and inclusion in one of the museum's notoriously provocative traveling exhibits.
Lost-n-Found-n-Lost (2000-2012)
After finding thousands of photographs that had been lost on the ground mostly around Washington, DC, I brought a selection of them to my neighborhood at the time in Hell's Kitchen. Along a symbolic pathway I walked, the photos were "lost" again when I dropped them on the ground hundreds of miles from where they were originally found, photographed them, and then walked away. The digital photos include metadata identifying the location the photo was taken. The curious may find the cache of images online and Google Map they are linked to, which reveals the pictogram I cut through the area as a clue to a riddle still hidden elsewhere.
Wilted Unicorn's DIY Conspiracy Theory Home Starter Kit (Intense) 2024
Part Four of the five-part instruction set includes these images documenting the beeswax casting process that was carefully developed to encase the origami boxed tapes inside without damaging them. Images of the instruments used to break the sculptures open, and their effects, demonstrate that the tapes emerge unharmed and playable, having undergone the ancient method of authentication and secure concealment, and the breaking of that seal depicted from tests.
Wilted Unicorn's DIY Conspiracy Theory Home Starter Kit (Intense) 2024
Part Five of the five-part instruction set includes these images documenting the hiding of one of the beeswax sculptures in an obscure public location in Manhattan. The fictional folks inspired by listening to the contents of the first tape, that those eavesdropped upon within intended nobody to be recording, much less ever hear, created a zine full of conspiracy theories about what they prophesied would come next given the revelations they claimed to have uncovered in dozens of other such tapes spanning decades. The zines they peddled on streets and subway platforms in NYC also included puzzling clues to the whereabouts of the first recording hidden in public. The group promised that the influential order of usually particularly secretive folks who were captured on it would be more than enough evidence to prove the authenticity of it and justify the fledgling cult's fear inspiring predictions.
Part Five of the five-part instruction set includes these images documenting the hiding of one of the beeswax sculptures in an obscure public location in Manhattan. The fictional folks inspired by listening to the contents of the first tape, that those eavesdropped upon within intended nobody to be recording, much less ever hear, created a zine full of conspiracy theories about what they prophesied would come next given the revelations they claimed to have uncovered in dozens of other such tapes spanning decades. The zines they peddled on streets and subway platforms in NYC also included puzzling clues to the whereabouts of the first recording hidden in public. The group promised that the influential order of usually particularly secretive folks who were captured on it would be more than enough evidence to prove the authenticity of it and justify the fledgling cult's fear inspiring predictions.
Tingleguts Home Dematerialization Endurance Game and Little Death Release Kit (February 2021) Version 1
At the dawn of the pandemic, I was enrolled in an MFA Fine Arts grad program in NYC, where I attended the first year of courses online and had limited access to studio spaces that otherwise would have been full of artists, 24/7. As the world made the most of unusual stretches of time spent in isolation at home, I began to explore the prolonged and nuanced sense of detachment I felt through interactive sculptures I'd create that could never be touched by my fellow students, mentors, critics, or myriad visitors to my virtual Open Studios events, on other sides of screens, elsewhere.
From the array of things on-hand or in storage within my makeshift home studio, necessitated by the global health crisis, I pulled an array of unusual objects together into a game system about longing for connection. As a multidisciplinary artist and designer, I have expertise strategizing cohesive experiential systems for global brands in industries as varied as digital education, architecture, and law. Drawing from the invaluable knowledge gained leading innovation initiatives for those clients, I designed the game to be an intersection of diverse belief systems, practices, and implements that I hoped would offer as many as possible a point of engagement with the provocative work.
Recognizing the necessity to create an aura around the game that would inspire remote viewers who could not to long to touch and inspect it, I pulled from my inventory objects I suspected almost none of them had encountered before to create the various aspects of the physical game set. For instance, my own fascination with neuroscience, being partnered to a renowned research neuroscientist for over two decades it happens, led me to purchase a brainwave entrainment device called the Nova Pro in the mid-2000s. Featured above after being custom painted fluorescent yellow and pink, the device connects to two sets of headphones and two pairs of light-emitting goggles. The device uses binaural beats and flashing lights in programs of sequences that when experienced cause the brainwave frequency of the user to attune to the frequencies taken in through the ears and closed eyes.
By way of this element of the richly layered game, two players can select the same brainwave frequency, be it theta (4-8 Hz), alpha (8-13 Hz), beta (13-30 Hz), or gamma (30-100 Hz), put the set on and arrive united in harmony with the Nova Pro and one another to continue the gaming experience after sharing the same 23-minute program. The game uses lucid dreaming states with other game pieces elsewhere, that this unit helps drop participants into, set for gamma. Any doubt that the unit actually works can be resolved by its ability to put the user to sleep using flashing lights and mild noise.
The game also includes a set of found AirPods and a painted game board made from material salvaged from scattered garbage collected from Manhattan streets. Players are encouraged to develop their psychic abilities using this set. Directions included with the kit indicate that after properly activating the surface of the rectangular board, in part successfully accomplished by laying it down so that the short sides face true north and south, players should clear their minds and formulate a yes/no question they want answered by the process. After ritually physically cleaning the found headphones and smudging them with provided sage, participants are then invited to gather the AirPods into their left hand and mentally ask them the question. After shaking the AirPods in their hand, players cast them on the activated playing board in an action called HandJobs, thus named to honor Steve Jobs and to mock the spermatozoa form Apple's designers arrived at for the notoriously slippery wireless headphones. In an act of scrying, players alone at home with thousands of casts to practice with, learn to read the position of the AirPods after the many HandJobs, and like a tarot deck or runes, know exactly in detail what could not be otherwise known by way of the practice.
In addition, the game includes a Herkimer Diamond, a quartz-based crystal that formed in the dolostone of Herkimer County, New York nearly 500-million years ago. While the consistent frequency emitted by quartz crystal makes them invaluable to the world of electronics, the unique double-terminated shape that Herkimer Diamonds form into is believed by some to contribute to its ability to be programmed with thoughts directed into it by the holder. Similar to the Genie in the bottle, the Herkimer Diamond is said to make quick work of delivering wishes, which it is powerless to resist delivering. Caution is advised to the uninitiated however, because Herkimer Diamonds are said always to act in the process to benefit the good regardless of the request. Therefore, it is said to be known for delivering dramatic surprises and creative interpretations of the wish that the beholder never considered but couldn't deny were fair. It is thought to be a teaching tool, and that this property of programmability helps players not simply focus and manifest, but heal and grow sustainably.
Finally, the game includes two containers, a painted found cannabis bottle and a painted zippered folder, each of which contains elements remote viewers are never described. Inside the bottle is a human-made human figure estimated to be over 1500 years old. The directions instruct players never to open the bottle or inspect it physically, but to use lucid dreaming to access its contents in time, and later to open the bottle to find what is hidden inside and compare. The zippered folder would never be opened nor described, however players are instructed to place batteries in the custom-painted baby shushers and turn them on in anticipation of the fright and upset they might feel upon opening it. The orange and green devices would also be useful to those finding it hard to relax into the game, who are urged to clear and quiet their minds with loving discipline.
Tingleguts Home Dematerialization Endurance Game
and Little Death Release Kit (March 2021)