Organoid Vending Machine (2026)
with Jan Zuiderveld, in collaboration with FinalSpark
“Nishimura’s Gakutensoku imagined a convergence of the natural and the technological: an artificial creature inspired by the organic world. Karel Čapek’s robots followed a similar logic, conceived as synthetic living beings. Seen from this perspective, synthetic biology and intelligence-in-a-dish may be less a rupture than a return — technology coming back home to its biological nest.”
‘Organoid Vending Machine’ (2026) is an experiment in biological computation, replacing the deterministic logic of a vending machine with the electrical activity of living human brain organoids. Grown from stem cells and interfaced with electrode arrays, the organoids register credit, select products, and drive the machine’s motors.
Unlike silicon systems, biological neural networks are dynamic and unpredictable: their activity fluctuates, drifts, and decays. There is no memory in the conventional sense—only electrical activity that rises with stimulation and settles back to baseline. Credit exists only as long as the organoids remain excited. Retrieving a product becomes a negotiation with the rhythms and temporalities of living tissue rather than a predictable, frictionless exchange.
The work asks what happens when everyday technological infrastructure develops its own organic resistance. How do our expectations of control and convenience shift when the machines built to serve us come alive?
