Organism + Excitable Chaos in Proximity Music: Echoes of Entropy
04.04.2025 - 06.04.2025 Rewire 2025
The Hague (NL)
Proximity Music is a joint exhibition program initiated by iii and Rewire. It seeks to connect music, architecture, technology, ritual, and play through sensory experiences.
Proximity Music: Echoes of Entropy explores how chaos and entropy act as both forces of creation and catalysts for change. Drawing inspiration from the second law of thermodynamics, where entropy signifies the inevitable drift towards disorder, the exhibition delves into the consequences of these forces on our environment, socio-political systems, and human interactions.
The chaotic motion of Excitable Chaos, a robotically-steered triple pendulum, drives the aerodynamic thresholds of Organism, a robotically prepared century-old pipe organ. Organism dismantles the conventional clean tones of the organ to sonify its turbulent materiality. Through the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy between its three moving arms, Excitable Chaos conducts Organism to create sound. This highlights how, in nature, even minor changes are key contributors to the pendulum’s unpredictable behaviour. This work reflects on how a sense of more-than-oneness may spontaneously develop in life and nature, and shows how a wild yet steerable relationality can help people to co-express unknown worlds.
Navid Navab is an antidisciplinary composer with a background in contemporary music, biomedical sonification, and philosophical biology. Through an investigative ArtScience practice, Navab's recent creations meticulously stage uncanny forms of order by imbuing machines with a sense of liveliness through fusion with the excitable dynamics of matter. These investigative works orchestrate sensory attunement to forms of life, at the pre-metabolic border between breathing and not breathing, while cybernetically enfolding these excitable dynamics.
Garnet Willis is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist, audio engineer, and instrument builder. Willis’s research investigates the crossroads between sensation, form over time, sentient matter, and material agency.
Aquaphoneia at 798 Art, Science Technology Biennale 2025: SYMPTOMATICA | HORIZON
11.01.2025 - 30.04.2025 798 CUBE
Beijing (ROC)
Aquaphoneia (2016) by Navid Navab
This alchemical installation features a floating horn that echoes the ghost of Edison’s machine. But unlike early recording, herding sound energy to etch pressure patterns in solid matter, this odd assemblage transmutes voice into water and water into air.
Disembodied voices abandon their sources to cross the event horizon of the horn. Estranged, the schizo-phone falls into the narrow depths of the bell, squeezed into spatiotemporal infinity, calcinated, liquified and released. The aqueous voice then flows into three alchemical chambers where inner time is surrendered to the tempi of matter: unbound, yet lucid and sound.
Organism + Excitable Chaos at Ars Electronica
04.09.2024 - 08.09.2024 POSTCITY, Bunker
Linz (AT)
Navid Navab is recognized as a media-alchemist and anti-disciplinary composer with a background in biomedical sonification. Navab’s work illuminates the intersection of investigative arts, media archeology, and philosophical biology and is characterized by sculpturous engagement with transductive structures of liveliness. His recent creations orchestrate sensory attunement to the dissipative formations and uncanny forms of order that flow from machinic engagement with excitable dynamics of matter.
A robotically prepared pipe organ driven by a robotically-steered chaotic pendulum
Navid Navab (IR/CA) in collaboration with Garnet Willis (CA)
This work probes the form-giving tendencies of nature by drawing kinetic chaos into conversation with sonic turbulence. The chaotic motion of Excitable Chaos, a robotically-steered triple pendulum, drives the aerodynamic thresholds of Organism, a robotically-prepared century-old pipe organ.
Organism dismantles the socio-historical tonality of the organ to sound its turbulent materiality, liberating long-repressed timbres to be heard anew. Excitable Chaos produces chaotic patterns by modulating the mass/orbital relations between its 3 moving arms. As a physical system with nonlinear behavior it highlights how, in nature, even events at the smallest scales of magnitude compel emergent behaviors whose next states are unknown.
Solo concert with a century-old pipe organ prepared robotically to sound turbulent patterning
In this solo performance centered around a robotically-prepared pipe organ, Navab improvises with Organism to explore ways in which its turbulent thresholds manifest unstable timbres.
A Casavant pipe organ built in 1910 is rescued from the indifference of gentrification at a heritage site in Montreal and brought back to life. Organism destabilizes the socio-historical tonality of the pipe organ to liberate its turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic repression.
During the concert, shifting metastable states allow for energetic thresholds to rapidly fall into and out of compatibility with one another. With no digital sounds, Navab aerodynamically shapes the resulting ecology of interdependent timbres into emergent realms, traversing microsonic polyrhythms, post-rock overspill and swampy soundscapes.
Navid Navab
Concert Organism: In Turbulence
5 September 2024
17:00 – 17:35
Ticket registration
HOPE: A touch of many
Theme exhibition Ars Electronica
Organism + Excitable Chaos
4 - 8 September 2024
POSTCITY, Bunker, Linz (AT)
Tickets
Organism & Excitable Chaos at Biennale ELEKTRA - Illusion
31.05.2024 - 21.07.2024 Arsenal Contemporary Art
Montréal, Quebec (CA)
Organism and Excitable Chaos by Navid Navab in collaboration with Garnet Willis
The exhibit probes into nature’s form-giving tendencies by putting kinetic chaos in conversation with sonic turbulence. Organism is an investigative platform for stochastic co-patterning via the sono-ecological indeterminacy of turbulent processes of formation. It dismantles the far-too-clean tones of the pipe organ in order to excite its turbulent materiality, unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic repression.
Excitable Chaos co-directs chaotic patterns by modulating the transductive resonances of a triple pendulum, a physical system with nonlinear behaviour due to the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy among its moving elements. It highlights one of the more spectacular ways in which nature demonstrates how even the smallest scales of magnitude are key contributors to an overall behavior whose next state is rendered unknown. Excitable Chaos's generative movement is sensed and mapped to drive the turbulent sonic thresholds of Organism.
Organism at Mois Multi
01.02.2024 - 11.02.2024 Mois Multi
Québec (CA)
ORGANISM
In collaboration with Garnet Willis
Centered around a robotically prepared century-old pipe organ, Organism is an investigative platform for stochastic co-patterning via the sono-ecological indeterminacy of turbulent processes of formation.
A Casavant pipe organ built in 1910 is brought back to life after being removed from the indifference of gentrification at a heritage site in Sud-Ouest, Montreal. Organism dismantles the far-too-clean tones of the pipe organ—that reductive triumph of Western civilization over the turbulence of nature—in order to excite the natural turbulent materiality hidden within the heart of its sound-generating process.
The rescued pipes, along with their pneumatic architecture, have been carefully modified to remove stabilizations which historically aimed to eliminate turbulent flow and its uncontrolled sound world, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic repression.