An artificial ‘brain’ grown from an avant-garde composer’s blood is making posthumous music
A team of artists and scientists have joined forces to create a lab-grown ‘mini-brain’ made from the blood cells of American experimental composer Alvin Lucier, who died in 2021, which is making music.
The project is known as Revivification and is hosted at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, where the free exhibition is running until August 3 this year.
Lucier was a trailblazer in the field of neurological sound generation. His 1965 work ‘Music for Solo Performer’ made him the first composer to use brainwaves to make music.
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The Revivification team began talking to Lucier in 2018, and he eventually agreed to donate his blood in 2020, aged 89 and suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He met with the team – comprising artists Guy Ben-Ary, Matt Gingold and Nathan Thompson and neuroscientist Stuart Hodgetts – every fortnight over Zoom until he died aged 90 the following year due to compilations following a fall.
Now the project has been completed and is on display.
The process involved advanced neuroscience, reprogramming his white blood cells into stem cells, which were then transformed into 3D cell structures that imitate brain activity known as cerebral organoids.
These organoids are now inside a sculpture which houses 20 brass plates which are connected to the two ‘in-vitro brains’, which look like white blobs anbd produce signals which send pulses through transducers and actuators which hit the brass and create “complex, sustained resonances that fill the space with sound”, according to the AGWA.
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The Guardian reports: “Importantly, Lucier’s organoids don’t just produce sound – they also receive it. Microphones in the gallery pick up ambient noise, including human voices and the resonant tones of the plates, and that audio data is converted into electrical signals and fed back into the brain.”
Speaking to The Guardian, Guy Ben-Ary said: “We’re very interested to know whether the organoid is going to change or learn over time.”
“When I told Lucier’s daughter Amanda about the project, she laughed. She thought, this is so my dad. Just before he died he arranged for himself to play for ever. He just can’t go. He needs to keep playing.”
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The Revivification team have pondered the ethical questions about authorship and artificial intelligence that the project raises.
“As cultural workers, we are really interested in these big questions. But this work is not giving the answers. Instead we want to invite conversations,” said Nathan Thompson. “Can creativity exist outside of the human body? And is it even ethical to do so?”
Find out more here.
[Via: The Guardian]
