Revivification: Lab-grown brain tissue of late composer Alvin Lucier making music at Art Gallery of WA

A pioneering sound artist who’s been dead for four years is creating music from beyond the grave using lab-grown brain tissue. The exhibition at the nexus of cutting-edge science and thought-provoking art is nestled in a horn-shaped corridor, adorned with brass plates, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. At its centre is the in-vitro brain of late American experimental composer and sound artist Alvin Lucier. Lucier had a rich history in sound experimentation — in 1965 he became the first artist to use brainwaves to generate live sound in Music for Solo Performer. He died in 2021, aged 90, from complications after a fall while battling Parkinson’s disease, but not before he’d donated his blood to the project in 2020. Titled Revivification, the work pushes biological innovation to its very edge. “It’s building on 15 years of research within SymbioticA (a biological arts research lab formerly based at UWA) looking at this intersection and overlap between neuroscience and art,” artist Guy Ben-Ary said. Ben-Ary is one of the five brains behind the exhibition — including Lucier himself. Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson, Matt Gingold and Stuart Hodgetts collaborated with Lucier in the years before his death to form the idea for the project. “He (Lucier) was very interested in the idea of not only eliminating the body, but moving the human aside and using their ‘disembodied brain’,” he said. Lucier’s blood has been on quite the journey. It was driven across state lines during the pandemic, roughly 180km from his home in Middletown, Connecticut to Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, where it was hand delivered to scientists who reprogrammed his white blood cells into stem cells using induced pluripotent stem cell technology. Stem cells can transform into many different types of cells, but in this case they were made into brain cells, or neurons. These became the building blocks for cerebral organoids, which are clusters of neurons that mimic a developing human brain. “Growing neural cells from those stem cells is quite easy, but this project revolves around the use of an organoid — a tissue organoid or a brain organ — so that’s much more recently been developed in terms of the technology,” Dr Hodgetts, a neuroscientist at the University of Western Australia, said. “(Organoids) are essentially neural tissue that recapitulates neuronal development. Some people like to call it a mini-brain, because it’s easier to give a label. “But they are rudimentary, three-dimensional neural tissue structures that go through certain steps that mimic early brain development.” AGWA curator Robert Cook said the art gallery was keen to take on the project “in the spirit of adventure” as it pushes audience expectations of art and science. “We took on this project with a sense that this was going to take us to a new place, and we were not really sure what that place was,” Cook said. “They (the artists) were developing these technologies as they were developing this show.” Each of the 20 brass plates in the exhibition is connected to the brain activity of Lucier’s organoid. The neural signals travel through transducers or actuators, striking the brass and turning the electric pulses to sound. In essence, the artists have created a surrogate performer for the late Lucier — from his own cells. But for the project to work, they have to keep the organoid in a laboratory-grade environment. Much of the technology they use to keep it alive and growing is bespoke and not commercially available. “That was really one of the major challenges for us, in terms of redesigning how we’re going to house Alvin’s organoids,” Dr Hodgetts said. “And interact with it,” Ben-Ary added. The organoid, which is quite small upon looking into the brass-laden plinth it’s housed in, is encased in a feeding mechanism and grows within and around the electrodes to which it’s attached. “We have to keep everything sterile. We have to mimic laboratory conditions to make sure that we don’t get contamination,” Dr Hodgetts said. What many don’t realise is that any extraneous noises — such as the nearby Perth train station or ongoing renovation works of the Perth Cultural Centre — affect the organoid’s output. “Any amount of electrical noise and interference can affect the signal,” Dr Hodgetts said. Although it’s first and foremost an artwork, Ben-Ary said the exhibition is also treated as an experiment. “Every week we come in, on Tuesdays when the gallery is closed. We open it up, we look at the recordings, we look at the data, we look at the feeding, we look at the viability of the organoid,” he said. “We look at anything that we can here, and we constantly improve it.” Four months in, they’re very close to perfecting the environment required to obtain a perfectly pure signal. Dr Hodgetts said it’s part of a wider project to see if organoids can be kept alive long-term in extreme environments with minimal human intervention. “We’re also looking at potentially getting into space and other areas that are outside of the laboratories,” he said. Once the exhibition has ended, the group will then look at how Lucier’s brain organoid not only generated sound, but how it reacted to that sound. “It’s a very unique opportunity they have to see how those cells react to environments in particular ways . . . how the show itself has changed what the show is,” Cook said. It’s a fitting homage to Lucier — much of his work explored the amplification and physical properties of sound and resonance. “(It’s) amplifying Lucier’s stem cells, reconfiguring those and giving it this other life,” Cook said. It also forces viewers to consider the broader ramifications of this burgeoning realm of biological creativity. The notion of immortalising someone through biological agency poses a maze of ethical, cultural and scientific quandaries. And the artists are acutely aware of the diversity of opinion in which they find themselves. “We know that obviously it (Lucier’s brain) is not immortalised, but poetically we’re trying to immortalise him through this biological agency,” Ben-Ary said. “I think that it’s really interesting to think about whether there’s a filament of memory that is transferred, or transformed through those processes, through Alvin’s cells to the final organoid that would encapsulate him — a little memory of what he was within the cellular structure.” Cook said the exhibition, which ends September 21, has so far attracted varied responses. He described the soundscape being created by the organoid as “gently disorienting.” The artists are blurring the oft-worn lines between art and science, forcing both their sceptics and advocates to sit in the discomfort of any arising questions, with no forthcoming answers. “People very often want a potential scientific explanation for questions like, is that really Alvin in there? Is there any intelligence? Some people will search for those types of answers,” Dr Hodgetts said. “Nobody has the answers to those kind of questions, but the idea is there. Can that change happen? And does it mimic normal biological behaviour? “That’s the richness of the project I think.”