Visitors to the Art Gallery of Western Australia are gathering around a glowing plinth, not to witness a live concert, but to experience the music of a man who’s been dead for four years. US composer Alvin Lucier, who died in 2021, has been brought back (sort of) in the form of a lab-grown brain, The Guardian reports. The project called Revivification uses a cluster of Lucier’s own reprogrammed brain cells to generate real-time music in response to its environment.
Lucier used brainwaves to make music in the 1960s to generate live sound in his seminal work Music for Solo Performer, so he agreed late in life suffering from Parkinson’s disease to donate his blood to a team of artists and scientists in Australia. That blood became the basis for what’s now a "mini-brain": a pair of white, jellyfish-like organoids grown from stem cells and connected to a custom interface that converts neural signals into sound. The installation features 20 parabolic brass plates, each hiding a mallet and a transducer that strike and resonate in response to the organoid’s activity. The setup also works in reverse: microphones feed ambient noise back to the brain, which could potentially learn and evolve over time.
“It’s alive – just not in the same way as you,” says artist Nathan Thompson, one of four core members of the Revivification team, alongside fellow artists Guy Ben-Ary and Matt Gingold, and neuroscientist Stuart Hodgetts. The group spent years developing the technology and meeting with Lucier over Zoom in the final months of his life.
The project has sparked questions about authorship, ethics, and what counts as creativity. The team insists it’s an art piece first, science experiment second, and a tribute to Lucier’s lifelong obsession with neural signals and acoustic space.
Lucier’s daughter reportedly laughed when she heard about the installation. “This is so my dad,” she said. “He just can’t go. He needs to keep playing.”
And so he does. In a dark gallery room in Perth, a tiny artificial brain pulses with activity, and the music of a dead man plays on.
