Life Forever is an immersive installation that merges swarm intelligence, thermodynamic theory and posthuman irony into an experimental ecosystem—an inefficient ASIC crypto-miner-heated Jellyfish Spa, supercharged by a karaoke stand. Borrowing its title from Life . . . Forever, a karaoke song by Mr Immortal Jellyfish Man (the alter ego of marine biologist and karaoke enthusiast Dr Shin Kubota), the work invites visitors to reflect on value systems through the entangled pleasure of purgatory, entropy, existence and decay.

We emit heat, and therefore we are. Inspired by physicist Jeremy England’s theory of dissipation-driven adaptive organisation—which proposes that life emerges as matter optimising its capacity to harness energy and disperse heat—the installation reframes humanity as an entropy-generating organism, the thermodynamic kin of crypto miners. Like ASIC machines computing Bitcoin hashes endlessly, converting electricity into heat while producing speculative digital “value”, humans burn vast amounts of energy in pursuit of meaning, profit, pleasure and civilisation. Yet as ASIC miners are swiftly rendered obsolete by design, our cycles of production, consumption and waste sustain ecological imbalance and accelerate the climate crisis—a self-inflicted feedback loop of overheating.

In contrast, jellyfish—among Earth’s most ancient organisms—thrive in warming oceans; some species even exhibit biological immortality, reverting to earlier life stages when conditions deteriorate. Neither victim nor saviour, the jellyfish drifts as a decentralised neural body, an adaptive mediator between human and machine excess, a tranquil inheritor of a planet warming itself into new forms of life.

Within this ironic space of thermodynamic mediation, Life Forever stages a dialogue between humans, machines and jellyfish. A Tamagotchi-like decision-making system allows participants, guided by hostess Lola, to balance or disrupt flows of profit and heat. Depending on their choices, humans are invited onto the karaoke stand to sing Life . . . Forever, its lyrics reworked to echo the project’s context—enacting a ritual of immortality.

Shamelessly balancing satire and systems thinking, Life Forever becomes a saturated rehearsal for a warming world. It invites us to consider whether we continue mining heat for abstract value, or learn from organisms that metabolise crisis into continuity—reimagining survival not as dominance, but as thermodynamic attunement.

Text adapted from the curatorial statement by Milia Bi Xin for 'Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria?' exhibition at FACT Liverpool (2026).

'Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria?' Exhibition views. © Image credits: Rob Battersby, Kieran Irvine

Life Forever was commissioned by FACT Liverpool for 'Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria?' curated by Milia Bi Xin. Heartfelt thanks to Nicolas Baldran, Matthias Pitscher, Samy Bouard-Cart, Rémi Opalinski, Ding Ding, Chloé Michel and Thomas Mosmant, Vuk Vukmanović, Nina Newbold, Mark Murphy , Charlotte Horn, Anne Dousset & Damien Duparc, Alexandre Simian, Eléa Rochat