Latest news with #AlvinLucier
ABC News
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Revivification at the Art Gallery of WA is a strange and tender revival of experimental composer Alvin Lucier
On a quiet Saturday morning in the heart of Perth, a crowd gathers inside the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), with the disoriented mood of any social event that takes place before noon. But there's also a sense of confusion about just what the mood should be. We are here, in theory at least, to listen to a performance by a dead composer who, beyond the dark, waiting tunnel of the exhibition entrance, is at least in some way physically present. Through the passageway is a "brain in a jar", curator Robert Cooke jokes, somewhat uneasily. It's part of an AGWA exhibition that makes a bold promise: to reawaken what has ceased to exist. Before the entrance, watching over the living, is a large photographic portrait of the late artist at the centre of AGWA's Revivification: the legendary American experimental composer, Alvin Lucier. For more than 50 years, until his death in 2021 at the age of 90, Lucier was a pioneering figure in electronic and electro-acoustic music. His work was often described as "making the inaudible audible". Lucier announced his artistic arrival in 1965 with his groundbreaking work 'Music for Solo Performer', which used then-cutting-edge technology to translate his brainwaves into sound on percussive instruments while he, the performer, sat still on a stage, eyes closed, electrodes attached to his head. This strange, speculative installation I'm standing before six decades on, feels like exactly the kind of thing Lucier might have created himself — if he'd lived long enough to make use of contemporary neuroscience that could, in effect, grow a brain outside of the human body. In Revivification, a collaboration between Australian artists Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson, and Matt Gingold, along with neuroscientist Stuart Hodgetts, the group attempts to bring Lucier back to life — not just metaphorically. They describe the work as an extension of Lucier's "cellular life". Inside a dark, cave-like chamber, 20 large brass plates line the walls. Behind each one sits a mallet connected to a motor, poised to respond to electrical activity from a miniature brain organoid: a cluster of neural cells, cultivated from white blood cells Lucier had donated before his death. The cells are alive. They are growing. Like a real brain, these neurons are communicating with one another. Using electrodes, the organoid's electrical activity is recorded and sonified — translated into sound — creating a feedback loop. In theory, the organoid could experience the sound vibrations it has helped to create and respond to them. The sound that results is some blend between the resonant tones of a temple, and a haphazard pitter-patter like a child on a drum set. At the centre of the chamber sits the organoid itself, sealed inside a box. Only one visitor at a time can peer down at it through a magnifying-glass porthole. The viewer in that moment has to alone contend with the question: What am I looking at? A hopeful, speculative dream, perhaps — that a person might indeed live on in some way after death, continuing to interact with the world, even continue to make art. Or, as Thompson puts it, were they peering into an "abyss": life, "but not of the same living experience"? The installation raises another question: even if we can continue a creative life after death, should we? The science behind Revivification is state of the art. But the feeling it evokes — the wonder and anxiety, the moral tension — is centuries old. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the obvious reference point. A work produced in another age of technological anxiety in the early part of the 19th century. Not unlike our present moment; the fears about scientific overreach in the context of AI, and the vulnerable place of the human in our rapidly changing world. And yet, beneath the speculative weight of Revivification lies something unexpectedly tender: a sense of deep affection. At its heart, the exhibition is also an act of homage. Four artists' love for an elder, and an unwillingness to let him go. In a panel following the opening, the artists speak with both humour and sincerity about the bonds they developed with each Petri dish of Alvin Lucier's cell tissue. "I had this really personal and emotional attachment to Dish 8," Gingold says to laughter, though he's serious. "Dish 8 had these really strong neural activations. "At some point, it got contaminated and there was one night where we knew it was going to die. And we were recording it. And it was really emotional because I could see these activations changing. I could see that it was going into these states where it was activating a lot and then dying back down. "It is something that is alive," Gingold says. "It's got a life of its own." In the final years of Lucier's life, the group spoke to him fortnightly via zoom. Before his death, Lucier's daughter, Amanda, told Guy Ben-Ary it was true to form that her father would agree to a project like Revivification. "She said, you know, it's so like him that at the end of his life, he's just organising a way to keep on composing." At one point speaking to me, Gingold strangles the word "spiritual" as he begins to speak it. Concepts of the transcendent or sublime have often seemed antithetical to the secular and scientific interests of experimental art. But Revivification has a strangely spiritual nature to its questions about the ineffability of creativity and where it might come from. In our increasingly disembodied age — where human creativity seems ever more threatened by non-human technologies — Revivification offers something quietly radical: a reverence for one man's life, and for the very human tissue through which he made his work. Revivification is at the Art Gallery of Western Australia until August 3, 2025.
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A Musician's Brain Is Making Music 3 Years After His Death
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." 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. You Might Also Like Can Apple Cider Vinegar Lead to Weight Loss? Bobbi Brown Shares Her Top Face-Transforming Makeup Tips for Women Over 50
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A Musician's Brain Matter Is Still Making Music—Three Years After Their Death
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." 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. You Might Also Like Jennifer Garner Swears By This Retinol Eye Cream These New Kicks Will Help You Smash Your Cross-Training Goals
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A Musician's Brain Matter Is Still Making Music—Three Years After His Death
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." 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. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Forbes
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Dead Composer Creates New Music, Through A Lab-Grown Brain
Legendary avant-garde composer Alvin Lucier died in 2021 — but that hasn't stopped him from making new music. Credit an artificial 'brain,' grown from his own cells, that emits sound-triggering electrical signals. This in-vitro structure lives at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. There, through Aug. 3, visitors can wander through 'Revivification,' an immersive installation that merges sound and biotechnology to imagine a compelling way creativity could, potentially, live on long after artists die. If you're picturing a Franken-Lucier rising from an operating table to conduct a symphony, science isn't there yet (at least not publicly). The provocative installation features tiny 3D organoids, sealed and displayed on a raised pedestal, that resemble a developing human brain. Their neural activity sends signals that activate electromechanical mallets to strike 20 curved, wall-mounted brass plates, sending ambient sound rippling through the gallery in real time. Lucier, who taught at Wesleyan University in Connecticut for decades, was himself intrigued with the physics of sound, and before he died at 90, played an active role in imagining various ways his creative spirit could outlive his physical body. 'The goal of 'Revivification' goes beyond simply preserving Alvin Lucier's music or creating a tribute to his work,' Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson and Matt Gingold, the three Australian artists who collaborated with him on the project, wrote in a joint response to my interview questions. 'Our project aims to fundamentally reimagine artistic immortality by creating a living extension of Lucier's creative essence.' The installation, five years in the making, poses intriguing questions: Can creativity exist outside the body? Does creativity retain our uniqueness after we're gone? Artificial intelligence and holograms are already bringing dead artists back to life, but 'Revivification' veers into the realm of biological intelligence to explore a new path for extending artistic legacy through living matter that functions as a surrogate performer. 'This living entity doesn't merely recreate Lucier's past compositions but continues his artistic journey through its own biological agency,' the artists said. 'It responds to its environment, adapts over time and generates new compositions that couldn't have been predicted by Lucier himself or by us.' Lucier was one of the first artists to use brainwaves to compose and perform music — for his 1965 piece 'Music for Solo Performer' — and he reveled in creating unpredictable soundscapes from everyday objects. Performers of his 1977 'Opera With Objects,' for example, tap two pencils together while touching them to various things — a matchbox, a jar, a plate — to produce a surprisingly shape-shifting acoustic experience. 'Your task is to make vivid for listeners the natural amplification inherent in physical things,' he told performers of the piece. Given Lucier's penchant for the unorthodox, it's no wonder 'Revivification' enthralled him so — he stayed engaged in the details on Zoom calls with the artists until nearly the end of his life. In 2020, when he was 89 and growing increasingly frail, he donated blood to the effort. The artists commissioned Harvard Medical School researchers to reprogram Lucier's white blood cells into stem cells, capable of differentiating into various types of specialized cells. Then, together with University of Western Australia neuroscientist Stuart Hodgetts, they grew neuronal structures atop a mesh of electrodes that both stimulate them and capture their signals. Notably, the organoids don't just produce sound, they receive it. Ben-Ary, Thompson and Gingold created a closed-loop system where microphones in the gallery capture ambient audio, including human voices and the harmonics of hammer against brass, and feed them back to the mini brain. The result is, in essence, a dynamic sonic conversation shaped by the interaction between live humans and the lingering essence of a dead one. 'By being in the space, visitors to the installation are influencing both the sound that others hear there, and the types of stimulations sent back into the organoid,' said the trio, who have worked at the intersection of art, biology and technology for years. The experiment launches as AI permeates creative fields — some artists celebrate its potential to steer their work in exciting new directions, while others fearing it will impact their livelihoods and possibly the very nature of creativity. So where do white blobs fit into the debate about art's bounds? They clearly lack consciousness, something many would consider essential to creativity. 'Creativity really has to have a conscious element to it. And I don't think this particular piece of art is conscious,' Indre Viskontas, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of San Francisco who studies creativity, told NPR. 'Those cells have no intention.' Still, it's easy to imagine a day when they might, especially with a new season of dark satirical series Black Mirror here to fill our minds with alarming scenarios of technology's unanticipated consequences. The artists believe it's not too early to begin pondering the tangled questions surrogate lab-grown performers such as theirs pose: What rights do we afford them? What are the ethical, philosophical and artistic implications of creating entities that may have the potential to be creative? 'These are just some of the questions we hope people ask themselves while experiencing 'Revivification,'' the artists said. 'We don't, however, wish to offer any answers to the exciting yet troubling possibilities it poses.'
