18/10

Sat 13—14 h KONTEJNER (Zagreb)

Artist talk with Nathan Thompson (AU) about the installation "cellF"

KONTEJNER invites you to join a talk with Nathan Thompson, Australian artist and one of the creators of the bio-sonic installation "cellF", on Saturday, October 18, 2025, at 1:00 p.m.

The bio-sonic installation "cellF" is the result of years-long work by a group of Australian artists and scientists, Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson, Darren Moore, Andrew Fitch, and Stuart Hodgetts, on the eponymous project, which combines biotechnology, visual art, sound, and philosophy, exploring the meanings of concepts such as humanity, life, and legacy.

"cellF" is Guy Ben-Ary’s surrogate performer and also the world’s first neural synthesizer. The ‘brain’ of "cellF" consists of Ben-Ary’s biological neural network, grown in a Petri dish, which in real time controls a series of analogue modular synthesizers specially designed to operate in synergy with the neural network. It is a fully autonomous, “wet,” analogue instrument. Ben-Ary provided a biopsy from his arm, cultivated his skin cells, and then, using induced pluripotent stem cell technology, transformed these skin cells into stem cells and differentiated them into neural networks. He grew them on specialized substrates to become his ‘in vitro brain’. The neural networks control the modular synthesizers in real time, producing sound.

Nathan Thompson (AU)

Nathan Thompson is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring the possibilities of man/machine interaction and the hidden corners that arise from this relationship. Mostly he implements machine/robots that play along the blurred edge of the interactive while showing independent thought, only slightly tethered to the audiences’ actions. His work often questions the role of humans in the natural landscape and through these investigations, builds a greater understanding of our inhabited space. His machines are self-built, analogue and lifelike in their behaviour, using custom electronic Neural- type networks that are on their own, very simple but when piggybacked, multiplied and fed back into the stream, display behaviour remarkably organic. The interpretations of this evolving machine language lead to an installation unique to every setting… the participant, oftentimes, both controls and is controlled by the mechanics of these unique lifelike constructions.

Supported by