McCarthy created an art project around Cocteau's "Orphée", at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2004, which consisted of forty assistants cutting up text, projecting it onto the walls and then re-assembling it into cryptic messages which were transmitted around London and the world by radio and internet. This project was indebted to William S. Burroughs's notions of viral media and to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's notions of the "crypt", a space both of burial and encryption. The art-piece Black Box, originally displayed in Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 2008, also involved constant radio transmissions. McCarthy has insisted that radio technology can be regarded as a metaphor for writing, comparing T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" to a radio programme.