Cody Lukas Portfolio
15 Images and 6 Videos (Total Runtime: 10min 52sec)
Webster
Site-Specific Installation
Rivers in New Zealand that have legal rights, androids receiving citizenship in Saudi Arabia and single-celled organisms discovered at the bottom of the ocean that take 10,000 years to reproduce. Everyday something happens that chips away at our normalized human centric understanding of life.
Webster grapples with definitions of what constitutes life. This tapestry of contemporary thought collates facts, categorisations, quantifications, formulae, experimental results and theory. It expands – definition by definition – to incorporate geological processes and geographic features, ambiguous technologies, cyborgs and emergent species.
Webster 2.0
Site-Specific Video Installation
A continuation of Lukas’ research in the field of living systems and takes its departure from his past work, titled Webster.
The artwork is a digital tapestry of contemporary thought, that dares audiences to explore, and to challenge their own conviction on the living world around them. To question where they draw their own line in the sand between Us and Them. And to reflect on what could happen if they viewed the world from a different lens.
As an exploratory work that rewards viewers to take the time to investigate its many nuances, Webster 2.0 examines the stakes and fallibility of human-made definitions of life, as each has its own moral questions and connotation. The work calls attention to the spatial and temporal barriers that prevent humans from perceiving certain systems and processes as living, and urges audiences to look inward and consider how definitions of life affect our moral understanding and inform our interactions with the world.
Plato’s Prisoners
Plato’s Prisoners is an immersive, interactive installation powered by the neural activity of cerebral organoids—lab-grown “mini-brains” cultivated from human stem cells.
In this work, audiences are invited to speak into a microphone, as their voices are transformed into gentle vibrations and transmitted into the organoid’s liquid environment. A tactile stimulus that evokes measurable responses in the organoid’s neural activity, which in turn are used to shape the light and sound that envelops the room, completing the two-way channel of communication between person and mini-brain – a conversation between two human entities.
The work invites audiences to reflect on the nature of reality and consciousness. Asking themselves: Are these bodiless brains any less human than they are? Or: How developed must they become before we give them the same ethical considerations we do other living organisms?
Created in close collaboration with researchers at the University of Southern Denmark: Marie Sejberg Øhlenschlæger, Pia Jensen and Martin Røssel Larsen. With additional assistance provided from researchers at KU and DTU in the research phase of the project.
Newborn
72 piece Wall Sculpture
“An insect that lives for only a day flies through a forest. With its limited time on the earth it does not see the trees sprout and grow.
To it, the trees are not alive.
The entire human race has existed on this planet for about 200,000 years; less than 2 minutes when compared to the age of the earth on a 24-hour clock. We do not see the mountains grow, or waterfalls carve their way across the landscape.
To us the earth is not alive.”
Where most young rocks today are 10,000 years old, an igneous rock is only as old as the last time it has undergone an igneous process. Here, the artist takes 300,000-million-year-old samples of rock from Arthur’s Seat and melts them.
These rocks, organically finding their own forms, were all ‘born’ on April 22, 2019. Created in collaboration with researchers at the James Hutton Geological Research Institute at the University of Edinburgh.
A simple act of masochism
Interactive Sculpture
Drawing the line between Us, as mankind, and Them, as all other organisms within the life-web, A simple act of masochism challenges man’s perceived dominance as “the intellectual alpha”, highlighting the presence of masochistic action within the human condition.
Drawing from the artist’s own relation to the subject matter and viewing his passion of rowing through a critical lens, the counter intuitive nature of the sport as a self-harmful action becomes apparent.
Rather than depict the ailments that arise as a result of this action, the process of self-harm through rowing is remediated in the gallery; where audiences are presented with the choice of electrocuting themselves in the space by touching the electrically charged metal casts of the artist’s own two rowing blades suspended in the space.
PROCESSING
Real time video work and print series.
Capable of regenerating its tail, fins and large quantities of its heart an infinite amount of times, the common zebrafish is a true testament to the resilience of life. Exploring the body as a self-sustaining chemical system, Processing remediates this biological process of cell regeneration with a generative software created by the artist, programmed to regrow a never-ending unique supply of zebrafish tail nerve networks.
This work was created as part of a collaboration with the Queen’s Medical Research Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland. The digital component of the work unveils the thought process behind the software in real time. How it thinks? How it decides the quantity and locations of the nerve endings? Where it stores them into memory, and how it decides where to grow and branch off?
The prints consist of 29 unique nerve networks created by the work; representative of the greatest number of attempts made by past researchers to determine the limit of the zebrafish’s regenerative capabilities, before giving up.
Host
Augmented Reality Triptych
Host converts digital code from computer viruses into DNA sequences, which are then plugged into my own generative software, in order to give them physical forms. These are then stored inside various oil painting within Augmented Reality.
Here, the process of the work’s creation is pivotal to its conceptual value, as today biological viruses are highly debated as to their classification as living organisms, due mainly to the fact that they do not have their own cell bodies; but rather they leach off of other organisms in order to carry out all the other characteristics and functions associated with living organisms.
Melissa and I Love You are two of the world’s most infamous computer viruses, which due to advances in modern technology, are no longer able to live in the digital environment.
Black Death is a macro computer virus created by the artist.
Vegan Friendly
Living Tapestry
100% “ethically” made from the body of the living organism known as Kombucha SCOBY, a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, that is suspended in the walls of the gallery as it slowly dehydrates over the course of the exhibition as to produce the “sustainable” material commonly known as vegan leather.
Although a harmful process for the living colony of organisms, when viewed anthropocentrically, the grown material is branded as ethically farmed vegan leather, ignorant to other forms of living entities operating outside of humans’ immediate perception, due to disconnects in scale, both temporal and spatial alike.
6 Kingdoms
Wall Hanging Tapestry
The artwork is comprised of fragments from organisms representing the six major kingdoms of life. All of which are sewn together and arranged in descending order corresponding to the amount of ethical considerations afforded by humans on a regular basis. The term kingdom being the second highest taxonomic rank in the classification system of all living organisms on Earth.
Animalia – Lamb skin
Plantae – Birch bark
Fungi – Mycelium colony
Protista – Marine algae
Bacteria – Kombucha SCOBY
Archaea – Though not represented as a physical patch on the artwork, they are still present, as they are present everywhere around us, including in our bodies, in water, in the soil, in the air, and most likely all around the artwork, invisible to the naked eye. Which within the context of the artwork represents their complete absence from our ethical consideration within the hierarchy.
FLOURISH
“A vulnerable creature,
a momentary symbiosis between the technological and the organic.
Through bodily contact and movement a dialogue arises,
as the boundaries between biotic and abiotic begin to blur.
Faces turned toward the past,
as history unfolds.”
Perched atop a mound of rubble, FLOURISH rests as an enigmatic, bio-inspired soft robot that exists not to serve, but simply to be. In the warmth of its stillness, it evokes the quiet grace of a snake basking on sunlit rocks, its form simultaneously natural and alien. The sculpture emerges as a paradox: a figure of delicate life within a desolate, dystopian context. Here, rubble speaks of human decline, yet it becomes a cradle for a new kind of organism—one that thrives in the absence of human utility.
FLOURISH offers no grand gestures of eccentric motion. Instead, it breathes softly, embodying a rhythm of life that resists the anthropocentric metrics of productivity or efficiency. It belongs to the lineage of “slow bots”— machines seen as inefficient or frustratingly deliberate. But unlike those judged by their human-serving utility, the artwork flourishes on its own terms, free of purpose or function. Its existence challenges us to question how we ascribe value to life and to consider futures where dystopia for one species may be utopia for another.
Created in collaboration with Jonas Jørgensen, Associate Professor of Soft Robotics at University of Southern Denmark.
Growth
Growth is an immersive sound installation created in close collaboration with the Danish biobank The OvaCure Collection, the world’s largest archive of ovarian cancer organoids.
Exploring the fragile threshold between life and death, the work reflects the duality of ovaries as sites of both creation and uncontrolled, cancerous growth. Using ultrasensitive hydrophone recordings of living organoids, metabolic frequencies were isolated, slowed, and amplified. Visitors are immersed in layered sound, light, and a suspended sculptural form as they are bathed in the distorted sound of real and distorted cancerous growth.
The artwork has been exhibited in various forms. It debuted on March 1, 2025 — marking the five-month anniversary since my own mother was operated to remove her breast cancer, and the five-month mark leading to the expected birth of my first child. A place where I myself stood in a personal space of flux, between fear and hope.
