transLAB + n-D::StudioLab

United States

Where do you locate yourself in relation to the systems you work with?

[ x ] A position you occupy As transLAB and nD::StudioLab, we occupy a shared position at the intersection of ArtScience, computational art, and interactive architecture. transLAB investigates how technology reshapes the relations between actual, transactivated, and virtual space, developing transmodal worldmaking across n-dimensional environments. nD::StudioLab is an adaptable research-creation space focused on eversive works that blur the divide between the virtual and the real, integrating software, electronics, sound, vision, and digital fabrication in one continuous practice. Our position is deliberately n-disciplinary: we stand where neurobiology, architecture, media arts, and computation overlap, and we treat authorship as distributed across labs, collaborators, and the systems we build together. [ y ] A vector you move along As a joint practice, we move along a vector of worldmaking and research-creation. From transLAB’s emphasis on transvergence, liquid architectures, and n-dimensional space to nD::StudioLab’s focus on architectonic media interventions and large-scale interactive systems, our shared trajectory is toward environments that behave like evolving worlds rather than static installations. We follow forces that pull us toward hybrid and collective intelligence: organoid activity, biophysical sensing, AI systems, and human collaboration across institutions. We resist closed, single-author narratives and instead cultivate frameworks—technical and conceptual—that allow multiple contributors, disciplines, and datasets to participate in each work’s unfolding. [ z ] A space in which your practice unfolds Our current space is both architectural and infrastructural: immersive rooms, projection environments, and exhibition sites on one side; on the other, a network of labs, instruments, protocols, and people distributed between Santa Barbara and Toronto. This space behaves less like a finished building and more like a liquid architecture—open, time-based, and continuously reshaped by flows of biological signals, code, sound, and participation. We think of its complexity as closer to a coral reef than a closed system: many heterogeneous elements, accumulating and interacting over time. The system is intentionally open to artists, scientists, and students who want to join, contribute modules, instruments, or perspectives. Each contribution adds to an ecology that is larger than the sum of its parts and designed to include rather than exclude

Where are you heading, and what is pulling you there?

As transLAB and nD::StudioLab, we are heading toward environments that behave less like artworks and more like living worlds—adaptive, multisensory, and shaped by interactions between biological signals, AI systems, and human collaborators. The direction is toward n-dimensional, liquid architectures that evolve through time, where perception, data, and space form a single continuous field of experience. We are pulled forward by the systems themselves: the unpredictability of neural activity, the generativity of AI, and the frictions that arise when disciplines meet. These forces draw us toward work that cannot be authored alone—work that requires distributed cognition and the merging of tools, practices, and perspectives. We are also pulled by a desire to move beyond representational uses of technology. Rather than visualizing data, we aim to build worldmaking infrastructures where data becomes behavior, where computation becomes architecture, and where collaboration becomes a structural principle. Ultimately, what pulls us is the possibility of creating open, inclusive systems—spaces that invite contribution from artists, scientists, engineers, performers, and audiences; spaces that expand through participation and remain in motion, never fully resolved.

How would you describe the space your practice is currently unfolding in?

Our practice currently unfolds within a space shaped by the conceptual and technical frameworks of transLAB and nD::StudioLab—a hybrid environment where architectural thinking, generative computation, and sensory worldmaking converge. This space behaves more like a liquid architecture than a fixed environment: boundaries are elastic, relationships shift over time, and structures emerge through interaction rather than predetermined design. Complexity here is ecological. The system grows the way a coral reef does—through accretion, branching, and the layering of contributions from many agents. Neural signals, AI processes, performers, collaborators, and audiences all add to the evolving topology. Nothing stabilizes into a single viewpoint; the environment remains open, porous, and responsive to new inputs. Spatially, the work unfolds across multiple registers at once: immersive projection rooms, distributed networks of sensors and signals, and the virtual spaces produced by generative computation. Temporally, it is driven by rhythms that do not align—neural firing, machine inference, human movement, environmental feedback—creating a field in which time is felt as variation, delay, resonance, and drift. This is an inclusive, continuously adapting architecture, one that overlays and transforms the predetermined structures of the built world. It expands as new collaborators join, as new signals enter, and as new relationships form. Rather than occupying space, the work makes space—open, evolving, and larger than the sum of its parts.

Published in >

The AI Art Magazine, Number 3

Quantum Global Organoid Orchestra [Q.GOO], AI generation, 2025.

transLAB + n-D::StudioLab, Quantum Global Organoid Orchestra [Q.GOO], AI generation, 2025

Description

Quantum Global Organoid Orchestra (qGOO) is an experimental art–science collaboration that links living neural tissue, generative media, and networked human participation to explore new forms of emergent creativity across species and systems. At its core are brain organoids—lab-grown clusters of neural cells cultivated in partnered neurobiology labs—which generate spontaneous electrical activity. This activity is recorded through high-density microelectrode arrays and translated in real time into sound, visual structures, and computational behaviors. In qGOO, organoids act as active “performers” within a hybrid ensemble of biological, human, and AI-driven processes. Their signals modulate generative algorithms that shape the audiovisual environment, while the resulting sensory field influences how audiences move, listen, and respond. The work thus operates as a closed-loop system of distributed cognition, where perception and agency are shared among living neural matter, machine interpretation, and human presence. Rather than presenting data as illustration, qGOO foregrounds sensation, emergence, and relationality. It invites reflection on the aesthetic and ethical implications of working with living neural material: what it means to position organoids—neither conventional subjects nor inert tools—as participants in an artistic system. By making the hidden rhythms of neural activity perceptible, the project proposes a speculative model of collective intelligence.

Process

qGOO grew out of an ongoing collaboration between transLAB and the Kosik Neurobiology Lab. Together, we began exploring how brain organoids, artificial intelligence, and human perception might form new kinds of immersive art–science systems—spaces where biological and computational intelligences intersect and influence one another in real time. The first outcome of this collaboration was "Protonoesis", exhibited at the NABI Art Center during ISEA 2025 in Seoul (credits: Nefeli Manoudaki, Iason Paterakis, Diarmid Flatley, Ryan Millett, Marcos Novak). The second, "Simulacra Naturae", was shown at die Angewandte, Vienna, for IEEE VISAP 2025 and will be exhibited at Currents New Media 2026 (credits: Nefeli Manoudaki, Mert Toka, Iason Paterakis, Diarmid Flatley, Stejara Iulia Dinulescu). Each iteration expanded our understanding of how organoid-driven systems shape sensory experience with living neural activity as a creative force. qGOO emerges as the next step: an effort to connect labs, artists, engineers, and scientists internationally, using brain organoid activity as a global real-time conductor. It is developed by the transLAB, nD::StudioLab, the Kosik Neurobiology Lab at UC Santa Barbara, and international collaborators including Marcos Novak, Mark-David Hosale, Iason Paterakis, Nefeli Manoudaki, Diarmid Flatley, Mert Toka, Ilze [Kavi] Briede, Marcus Gordon, Ken Kosik, Tjitse van der Molen, Alan Macy, Ken Fields, and composer Gene Coleman.

Tools

The work is built as a real-time, multi-layered A/V system. The core visual composition runs in TouchDesigner, with spatial audio composed and performed in Max/MSP. Brain organoid activity is streamed and analyzed by a custom JavaScript application, which extracts features from spike trains and sends control data to TouchDesigner and Max, orchestrating all layers of the installation in real-time. For generative elements, we used Stable Diffusion 2.1 within a distributed AI diffusion pipeline, and built control interfaces and simulations in React.js, JavaScript, Unity, and Processing. Networked communication across machines and locations relies on MQTT (via SHIFTR), which was crucial for keeping multiple visual layers synchronized at a final resolution of 10,560 × 2,160. The performance ran in two locations simultaneously: Toronto and Santa Barbara. The installation operates as a closed-loop system between brain organoid data and human biodata. During a live performance in Toronto, EEG signals from a performer—recorded with Biomeci’s "Source" device while she viewed the organoid spikes through custom-made glasses with LEDs—were sent back to the transLAB installation in Santa Barbara, modulating the evolving audiovisual composition and completing the feedback loop.

Image credit: Grit Wolany x Midjourney

Grit Wolany is a freelance art director and AI scout at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Her artistic focus lies on explorative work with generative algorithms. Grit teaches GenAI at various universities and regularly holds workshops and lectures.

Quantum Global Organoid Orchestra: When Biology Conducts

Essay by Grit Wolany

Imagine a few thousand brain organoids—neural cells, grown in a lab, never part of any consciousness—begin to fire. Spontaneously. Rhythmically. And somewhere in Santa Barbara and Toronto, sound and image emerge from that.

The Quantum Global Organoid Orchestra (qGOO) is one of those works that makes you stop and think: what the heck? Together with neurobiologists, transLAB and nD::StudioLab have built something that resists easy categorization—too alive for an installation, too artificial for nature, too collective for a single artwork. The electrical impulses of living cell clusters are translated in real time into sound, moving image, and spatial experience. The organoids transmit. The algorithms respond. Nobody conducts. Everything conducts.

What moves me about this work is not the technology alone. It’s the questions it raises without ever stating them: what is intelligence? What is expression? And what happens when we stop deciding who these concepts belong to?

Perhaps that’s what art can offer here: genuine wonder at what emerges when boundaries become permeable—between the living and the digital, between author and material, between laboratory and stage.

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Published in:
The AI Art Magazine, Number 3,
April 2026

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transLAB + n-D::StudioLab

United States