BICEPHALIA: Tyler Friedman

Gallery Gudmundsdottir presents Bicephalia, the first solo exhibition by composer and artist Tyler Friedman. Bicephalia is a sound and light installation consisting of collage poetry embedded within an octophonic orchestral fiction.

Dwelling on contradictory and incompatible impulses towards storytelling and musical abstraction in the age of information saturation, attention deficit, the futility of art under fascism and emergent machinic logics, Bicephalia is a divination of fragmented imagination — and a warding spell against media overload. It transmutes opioid micro-narratives, symbol corrosion, lexical enumeration, psycho-activity and slop into a poetic index of processes and systems through which meaning is structured, positing music as a post-semantic language of affective vibrational mathematics.

Densely referential, Bicephalia has at its core a recitation of thematic extracts and depictions — topically drawn from science fiction, tuning theory, archaeology, modernist poetry, political desperation, occultism, linguistics, biology, LLMs, mythology, and more — which are braided into a structured destabilization of logocentric logic. Enveloping the speech is an orchestral composition that ascends through a series of timbral categories and symbolically structured harmonic spaces.

Staged as a multidimensional sonic experience, Bicephalia’s two aspects arise from conflicting urges: from the one head to express content and conjure pattern upon a prison of words — and from the other head towards the creation of absolute music and the possibility that “meaning” is perhaps most potent escaped from signification.