Tech

Australian artist creates music from his own stem cells

by Jeremy Mersereau

Where will it all end? First people were synthesizing prank calls, then they were making playable Lego guitars, next you’ll be telling me an artist has made a musical instrument out of, I don’t know, his own neural stem cells or something!

Yes, that’s it exactly: Perth, Australia-based artist Guy Ben-Ary has created what he calls the “world’s first neural synthesizer” out of his own skin cells.

Inspired by questions about “the materiality of the human body” as well as his own childhood rock star fantasies (not to mention, as his website states, an “ultimately narcissistic desire to re-embody myself”) Ben-Ary sought to create a “biological self-portrait.” He chose to do this by harvesting skin cells from his own arm, transformed them into neural stem cells (which is apparently possible through iPS technology, wherein adult cells can be induced to return to an embryonic stem cell state), and then used those cells to control a synthesizer that interprets external, human-made music into electrical impulses. Well, that’s one way to kill an afternoon, I guess. This illustration might help explain the process:

The work, known as CellF, is entirely analog: no programming is used from end-to-end. The work premiered in October with the help of an experimental sound artist, whose drumming was then interpreted by the neurons which controlled the synth. Video of the premiere is still being worked on, by Ben-Ary promises it by mid-December. CellF: the perfect family holiday viewing!

For anyone skeeved out by the Frankenstein-esque process, just be grateful they were arm cells this time: an earlier project of Ben-Ary’s, In-Potentia, used stem cells induced from human foreskin purchased online. One can only hope that the premiere was billed as “raw and uncut.”