Carsten Höller: ‘We have been very successful in eliminating the unpredictable'

“In our culture the fly agaric especially is some kind of empty symbol”: Carsten Höller’s contribution to the Beyeler's summer show explores cultural perceptions of the fungus © John Scarisbrick
In May, the Fondation Beyeler opened its summer exhibition, in which the entire museum and its surrounding park have been transformed into an experimental contemporary show with an intermittently changing title, organised by a cluster of über-curators and artists, including the Beyeler’s director, Sam Keller, the Serpentine Galleries artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist and the artist Precious Okoyomon. Among the works is Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics (2024), a collaboration between the German Belgian artist Carsten Höller and the MIT scientist Adam Haar Horowitz—and potentially the first instalment in a magnum opus that will eventually comprise seven dream-themed installations. It is the latest of many works in which Höller has explored sleep, dreaming, hallucination and altered states, and builds on earlier pieces involving mushrooms, and particularly that most famous and emoji-friendly fungi, the fly agaric.
Upside-Down Goggles (1994-ongoing), shown above at Mexico City’s Museo Tamayo in 2019, aims to create a feeling of disorientation and alienation among users © Pierre Björk; Museo Tamayo
The Art Newspaper: The overall project is for a seven-room Dream Hotel. Tell us more about that.
Carsten Höller: The idea would be to create a hotel that has seven rooms and each of these rooms is specifically designed to give your dreams content. Also, you can change the content: you can steer your dreams while you’re dreaming. On top of this, you can recall your dreams much better, so that they also play a part in your life after the dream, when you’re awake again.
You have been working with Adam Haar Horowitz and MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Lab, which is looking at “targeted dream incubation”.
I shouldn’t really speak for Adam but he is one of the first real dream scientists. We know that you can create dream content; you can interact with sleeping people and modify their dreams, in a way. Adam has been working extensively on this; he had a dream research lab with people sleeping there. Mainly, it’s about putting them in the right setup. You need to have almost a mantra telling yourself that “I want to fly in my dreams. I want to dream about flying.” And then this is also supported by audio voices—again, giving you the information that you should dream about flying. Then there’s also different ways of measuring where you are in your sleep stages.
Have you had a flying dream?
I’m absolutely like an average person, which means I dreamt of flying when I was young. And that’s what most people say. The strange thing with flying dreams is that you recall them very well, so they don’t disappear like other dreams. They stay with you for a long time. There’s something special about it because it’s the ultimate idea of liberation, in a way. It’s the ultimate idea of freedom. It’s the very naive, romantic dreams we have about letting it all behind and flying away, effortless. That’s what a flying dream can give you. You cannot do this with any technical device because of the effortlessness of it—that’s the magic in it.
Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics consists of “hexapod” beds, which are positioned on six feet and can tilt in different directions Alejandro Medina
This first room is called Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics and continues the leitmotif in your practice of the mushroom. You are obviously interested in the science, but the mushroom also has a cultural value, doesn’t it?
I’m not so much interested in the natural science part of it, because I was a scientist and now I’m an artist. I really made a break in my life, so I’m looking at it from the other end. But yes, it feels like in our culture, the fly agaric especially is some kind of empty symbol because we still use it; it connotes luck, for instance, or we use it as a symbol, as an emoji. But it possibly had a completely different position in our culture, especially in the northern hemisphere, where the mushroom grows, because of its psychoactive qualities.
The other element is beds. This relates to other works: roaming beds that people could sleep in at night in the Hayward Gallery, for instance. But this new bed is rocking, to send the viewer to sleep.
It’s actually on six feet; you call it a hexapod. And the hexapod can move in six different ways, which means it can go up and down, it can tilt in all directions. It reminds me a bit of being on a ship. But in contrast to the ship that goes back and forth, the bed moves unpredictably. It’s both disorientating and comforting, so it’s a good way to make you fall asleep. Then it starts to move again when you are in different sleep stages in order to make you remember about flying with flying fly agarics. It even wakes you up when you’re in an R.E.M. sleep state and tells you with a voice to remember to dream of flying with flying fly agarics.
You once said that you wanted to free viewers from “the dictatorship of the predictable”, so this is another element of that process.
Yeah, because in our culture we have been very successful in eliminating the unpredictable; we are really good at this. We have managed to develop this desire of ours to foresee what is going to happen, because it gives us a certain control over our lives. Which then, almost automatically, raises the question: why don’t we consider unpredictability as a form of luxury—something that, when you’re all fine, you know you can fall back into the unpredictable and find a way to expose yourself to it and basically see what it does with you? That’s a luxury. You can’t do that when you live in difficult circumstances, like when you’re in a war situation. But if you’re in a situation where you’re in England—I’m in Sweden—I think this is something quite urgent to do, because we need to know who we are. We don’t know who we are when we just go on with this one track of predictability, I believe.
Have you thought about the Surrealists’ engagement with dreams during this project? Of course, they were interested in dreams in relation to Sigmund Freud. But they were also interested in dreaming almost as a political act, because they were reacting to the devastation of the First World War. For them, it was a revolutionary act to welcome the irrational and the unpredictable.
I totally agree, and I think the Surrealists would also probably have felt not only the potential as a method to use it but also the luxury side of it, after the war; that you could finally dream again and use your dreams and create something out of your dreams. It’s remarkable that we are still going on this one path of wanting to know what is going to happen. Like I said before, the other way—of not knowing what is going to happen—is so much more interesting. If I have the possibility, that’s what I want to do. So I create artworks which give you the possibility.
• Summer Exhibition, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, until 11 August

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