Building on the research I began in 2024, I organised a series of looking meditations with an interactive piece.

For Last Universal Common Ancestor in the Gallery at LIS, an exhibition frame its titular protagonist as a creature holding the infinite creative energy of life and the possibility of unfulfilled potential. It challenged the viewer to imagine alternative realities where life’s creativity unfolds in endlessly different ways.

The show featured a new media piece Genesis: Bound to Time, a digital representation of the LUCA that continuously evolves in real-time, by SEADS artists Mary Pedicini, Pieter Steyaert, Pim Tournaye and Kat Pegler.

On the final day of the exhibition, I hosted a series of short meditations in interaction with Genesis. Viewers were able to wear the Muse 2, a portable EEG headset, that captured their brainwave data and informed our digital creature how to evolve in response.

LUCA changed colour and shape depending on viewers’ levels of meditative brainwaves, creating a positive neural feedback loop and helping them find relaxation as they witnessed it change shape in real-time. The experience merged the individual creative potential of one’s own consciousness with the primordial wellspring of life's diversity.