Art Gallery of Western Australia
Perth ― Western Australia ― 2025
Can creativity exist outside of the body? What happens to artists’ creativity once they have passed away? Could the essence of a performer be retained beyond physical presence?
Situated within debates around human agency and the impact of generative AI, Revivification is an attempt to immortalise the late experimental composer, Alvin Lucier. The project gives him new life by creating his biological ‘surrogate performer’ – a living autonomous entity that keeps on creating, long after his death and is driven by what we refer to as In-vitro intelligence.
Lucier, who passed away in 2021, was a legendary avant-garde composer that transformed how we think about composition by shifting focus from virtuosic performance to the physical properties of sound itself. His work with brain waves, echolocation, and room acoustics blurred the lines between music, science and art.
We met Lucier In 2018. At 87, despite his frailty, his revolutionary spirit remained powerful. We began a collaboration through fortnightly video meetings, exploring potential artistic projects together.
During our conversations with Lucier, we speculated on ways to immortalize Lucier’s artistic essence through biological agency. This idea became Revivification, a project that embodies the experimental spirit that defined Lucier’s career, while opening new frontiers in the relationship between biology and artistic expression.
At its heart, Revivification is a direct extension of Lucier’s cellular life. Using his donated blood cells and bio-technology, we created mini brain organoids – three-dimensional structures resembling a developing human brain. This transformation created his ‘surrogate performer’ that continues his artistic journey and legacy.
Housed within an immersive sound environment, this surrogate performer does not merely exist—it creates. It responds to its surroundings, creating ever-changing sonic landscapes that provide a permanent, dynamic presence in museums and galleries.
In order to realise this project, we faced numerous technological challenges. The first was to transform Lucier’s donated blood cells using Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell technology and then directing them into cerebral organoids.
To maintain these living structures over long periods of time in the art gallery, we developed a specialized automated life support system capable of functioning for months with minimal intervention. We use a Multi-Electrode Array Interface Dish with 64 electrodes on an ultra-thin suspended mesh that allows the organoid to grow within and around them.
Furthermore, we developed our own electrophysiology software to interface with these dishes, processing the complex data sets generated by the organoids’ neural networks in real-time.
This allows the organoids to both ‘express’ their neural activity via audio transducers and electromechanical action, and in turn ‘sense’ that audio-action via microphone sensors.
Revivification marks a historic first – a deceased composer continuing to create after his death.
At the heart of the installation stands a sculptural object housing Lucier’s “in-vitro brain” and its life-sustaining technologies. Surrounding this are twenty hand crafted brass plates. Each plate is connected to the neural activity of Lucier’s cerebral organoid or ‘in-vitro brain’. As the organoid’s signals pulse through transducers and actuators, they strike the brass, creating resonances that fill the space—phenomena Lucier explored throughout his career.
Microphones capture the resonant tones, which are fed back to the organoid via neural stimulation. This creates a continuous feedback loop allowing the surrogate performer to adapt and compose new work within the gallery.
Unlike AI systems that seek to optimize and predict, Revivification embraces unpredictability and emergence. This represents “in-vitro intelligence” – neither artificial nor natural, but a living neural network functioning outside the body with its potential for emergent properties.
This is not preservation or simulation, but a form of “postmortem play” where Lucier’s biological material continues to create in ways neither he – nor we – can fully predict. The surrogate performer does not computationally reconstruct Lucier’s work but extends his compositional ethos by embracing indeterminacy and the agency of sound itself.
Revivification was created with Lucier’s full knowledge and consent—his donation of biological material was a conscious choice to participate in this posthumous collaboration. This ethical foundation distinguishes the project from synthetic reconstructions of deceased artists’ work.
Revivification proposes a provocative vision of artistic immortality and speculates that Lucier’s creative essence persists beyond death, raising profound questions: What is measurable and immeasurable in artistic agency? Can biotechnology enable creative expression to transcend physical boundaries?