Alvin Lucier’s afterlife is “a dark space; very meditative and sort of respectful,” says University of Western Australia artist Matt Gingold, one of the late American composer’s … let’s say custodians. “When you walk in, you see these brass plates that are very beautiful and handmade, and you hear these sounds like gongs.”

The plates are responding to electrical activity from organic matter grown from Lucier’s donated white blood cells, visible inside a plinth in the darkness. “People lean over to look in, and you can feel this heat that you just know innately as human body temperature,” says Gingold. “And you realise that this work is alive.”

This is Revivification, a sound art installation at this year’s Now or Never “festival of new dimensions” in art, ideas and technology. In an era haunted by the rise of non-human intelligence, it’s the most unsettling of several events exploring what happens to art as human agency recedes. “What is alive in the space are cerebral organoids,” explains bio-artist Guy Ben-Ary, another member of the Revivification team of neuroscientists, artists and technicians. “You can think about it as a living neural network: living tissue that originated from the legendary composer Alvin Lucier.”

Lucier died in 2021, but “we formulated the project with Alvin, with his full knowledge and his consent,” Ben-Ary stresses. “It was his conscious decision to participate in this … posthumous collaboration.”

Sound art fans will note the symmetry. Lucier’s work was largely preoccupied with creating conditions in which rooms, brainwaves and other physical systems helped determine how music unfolded. “He’s part of the whole lineage of John Cage and the Fluxus movement, which was already pushing the idea of intentionality in art … about creating the conditions for something and kind of letting it play out,” explains Gingold.

Revivification ventures further into the uncanny. What or who is making those sounds in the darkness of the Melbourne Town Hall? How is it responding to its surroundings? Will it learn and evolve as it grows? “One of the core issues and questions that we’re trying to talk about with this work is how much of Alvin is retained in those brain organoids,” Ben-Ary says. We don’t know, he concedes, “but we have this artistic licence to speculate.”

American ambient composer William Basinski will be alive and physically present for SOMNIA, an overnight sleep concert with Norwegian saxophonist Bendik Giske at Now or Never. This time, the grey area lies at the receiving end of the artistic exchange. As Basinski begins the “diffusion” – “it basically means I press play” – of his newly remastered signature work, The Disintegration Loops, an audience tucked up in single beds at the Royal Exhibition Building will be encouraged to drift in and out of consciousness over more than 10 hours.

“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” Basinski says, “but get fortified, if you know what I mean … I’ll come out, say hello to everyone, and tell everyone to unfasten their seat belts and prepare to float freely.

“You’re getting to hear the work on an extraordinary sound system in a beautiful space with people that are there to experience it with you, together. It’s a very rare and wonderful experience to have, especially in this day and age when everybody’s so consumed with anti-social media doomscrolling and all that other garbage.”

Again, there’s poetry in the relationship between concept and material. Basinski made The Disintegration Loops in 2001 while digitising tape loops recorded years earlier. As the original tape material slowly disintegrated, its decay became the essence of a work invoking time and dissolution.

At SOMNIA, all four albums will be presented in a single, continuous program for the first time as the audience is encouraged to loosen its grip on the material world. Basinski may even have a little lie down himself, he supposes, if the threshold of unconsciousness beckons. “Even if you’re asleep, it’s still going into your brain, and your brain is processing it, maybe in another realm or something,” he says with a wave of his hand. “It goes in, and it can create a wonderful sense of calm and rest. It’s music therapy … it’s a deep listening experience.”

As different as they are, Revivification and SOMNIA both unsettle conventional ideas of performance and listening. One unfolds without a living composer, the other permits the conscious audience to disappear. In each, the work continues after attention has receded.

This diminished human presence appears elsewhere in the Now or Never program. The Chunky Move dance piece Time Remaining is billed as “a constant negotiation of control and survival, between human presence and contemporary machines … performers appear as an endangered presence, caught in an ongoing contest with the technologies that grip our world.”

Matt Gingold of the Revivification team believes “there’s just a crisis right now of human agency. We’re having to look at ourselves again, slightly in an alien way, reconsidering who we are and how we’re bearing witness to the performance of being human.”

For William Basinski, the question of what art still requires of human beings is easy to answer. “The heart,” he says. “It comes from intuition and gifts and magic and love. So that’s the recipe for me.”

For pianist and writer Anna Goldsworthy, the prospect of diminishing human involvement has made the flesh and blood part of her practice feel more, rather than less, consequential. She will appear at Now or Never to discuss The God We Made, her Quarterly Essay piece on the threat and promise of artificial intelligence.

Writing it brought about “some dark nights of the soul” and “moments of feverish panic” about the broader existential picture, she says. But the threat of human creativity being decoded and replaced by AI has only intensified her attachment to what she calls the “deeply embodied” pleasure of music. “I just keep on coming back to the notion of human flourishing,” she says. “Why else develop this technology if not to serve our humanity?”

She recalls being backstage at a recent concert and saying to her trio, “Aren’t we just so lucky that we can play musical instruments? My God, I love being a musician at the moment. Learning an instrument means coming to terms with these unruly machines that we occupy, which is our bodies.” Just as important is the shared act of listening: “A room full of people meditating communally on the human experience, and what that means in terms of community; an acknowledgement of shared inner life.”

Goldsworthy’s conversation with Antonia Pont at The Edge theatre will culminate in a solo performance on an unamplified piano. The piece is yet to be chosen, but its function is already taking shape: “A demonstration of something that a human body can do after copious amounts of labour.”

Meanwhile, back in the darkness of the Melbourne Town Hall, those cerebral organoids will send their signals and the brass plates will sound. They may contain everything or no surviving essence of the composer at all, but as we lean over the warm plinth, it’s Alvin Lucier we’ll be listening for.

Now or Never runs from August 19 to 30. See the whole program at nowornever.melbourne.vic.gov.au

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