🔗 The composer still making music four years after his death

🔗 The composer still making music four years after his death

Under a magnifying lens sit two white blobs, like a tiny pair of jellyfish. Together, they form the lab-grown “mini-brain” of the late US musician Alvin Lucier – composing a posthumous score in real time.

Artists grow stem cells taken from Alvin Lucier and incorporate it into an artwork. There’s always a lot of “AI will destroy us all” commentary around stories like this, in practice I suspect whatever is in the petri-dish is behaving more-or-less as a random number generator. I love Lucier’s collection of lectures on contemporary music Music 109 and I’m sure he intended this project to be thought-provoking and make for a good yarn.