Automaticity and endings: The revivification of Alvin Lucier

This article examines Revivification (2025), a practice-based research project by Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson, Matt Gingold and Stuart Hodgetts in which cerebral organoids, grown from composer Alvin Lucier’s blood, activate a set of gong instruments in a gallery installation. The work extends Lucier’s experiments with neurofeedback and indeterminate processes into a biotechnological domain: the organoids generate a continuous musical texture shaped by biological feedback but cannot bring their activity to an end. This contrast frames a broader inquiry into how human action differs from the automatic behaviour of engineered organisms. I argue that the capacity to interrupt or cease patterned activity – present in Lucier’s use of indeterminacy – marks a key difference between humans and the organoids in Revivification . Ben-Ary and his collaborators render this lineage of musical indeterminacy materially through bioengineering, placing the installation within broader discussions of automaticity, reproduction and agency. The article concludes that Revivification underscores a specifically human ability to terminate automatic processes in this context, a capacity made audible through the work’s musical and biological systems.