A Musician's Brain Matter Is Still Making Music—Three Years After His Death
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In collaboration with American experimental composer Alvin Lucier, who passed away in 2021, scientists and artists created an art installation using cerebral organoids developed from the composer's white blood cells.
Hooked up to transducers and actuators, these organoids created music by using electrical impulses to strike brass metal plates arranged throughout the installation.
The art installation, called Revivification, analyzes the nature of living beyond death, the essence of creativity, and the persistence of memory.
American composer Alvin Lucier was well-known for his experimental works that tested the boundaries of music and art. A longtime professor at Wesleyan University (before retiring in 2011), Alvin passed away in 2021 at the age of 90. However, that wasn't the end of his lifelong musical odyssey.
Earlier this month, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, a new art installation titled Revivification used Lucier's 'brain matter'—hooked up to an electrode mesh connected to twenty large brass plates—to create electrical signals that triggered a mallet to strike the varying plates, creating a kind of post-mortem musical piece. Conceptualized in collaboration with Lucier himself before his death, the artists solicited the help of researchers from Harvard Medical School, who grew a mini-brain from Lucier's white blood cells. The team created stem cells from these white blood cells, and due to their pluripotency, the cells developed into cerebral organoids somewhat similar to developing human brains.
'At a time when generative AI is calling into question human agency, this project explores the challenges of locating creativity and artistic originality,' the team behind Revivification told The Art Newspaper. 'Revivification is an attempt to shine light on the sometimes dark possibilities of extending a person's presence beyond the seemed finality of death.'
The question is a prescient one. With the development of ever-advancing large language models, or LLMs, companies have already created digital recreations of people that 'live on' after death. Scientists have explored the idea of a hybrid consciousness that creates a shared reality between biological beings and artificial intelligence, or other ways to upload our consciousness to computers (if consciousness turns out to be purely computational, which… the jury is still out on, to say the least). As for Revivification, the deeper question isn't about our technological future, but about the ineffable quality of memory and what it means to be human.
'The central question we want people to ask is: could there be a filament of memory that persists through this biological transformation? Can Lucier's creative essence persist beyond his death?' the team told The Art Newspaper.
Although this 'mini brain' obviously lacks the complex consciousness of a 90-year-old artist, neuroscientists and biologists have pondered what the lived experience of brain organoids might be like—even wondering if these simple biological creations possess a kind of consciousness. Going even further, some biologists believe that our very cells contain some form of consciousness, if not exactly an experience we'd typically understand as consciousness.
While we can't know what this organoid's music-making experience is like, one thing is certain: the question of living a life after death is no longer an exclusively spiritual one.
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