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. 

Navid Navab
Biennale Elektra

Aernoudt Jacobs presents the Dutch premiere of Akoetrope. A unique and self-developed rotating sound machine, which is both an intuitive device and scientific strategy for understanding the persistence of sound cognition. The device is freely inspired from the Phénakisticope/Zoetrope devices that were invented around 1833 that use the phenomenon of iconic memory (or persistence of vision) to create a moving image in the human brain. 

In the sonic domain we can find a relatively similar phenomenon called ‘echoic memory’ – sounds which resonate in the mind and are replayed for a brief amount of time shortly after being heard. Both phenomena rely on short term sensory memory information that lingers on the threshold between perceiving and remembering.

Other featured performance artists: Maria Komarova, Amos Peled, Suzan Peeters, Myra-Ida van der Veen

Aernoudt Jacobs
FIBER Festival

A large inflatable fills the room and  slowly transforms into different abstract shapes. Like an enlarged deep sea creature it slowly and quietly contracts and expands into different corners of the space.  

EXHALE starts from a movement we all share: breathing. This process of inhaling and exhaling as an expression of our physical and mental states is in constant change and usually unconscious. Yet it can also be a portal to control psychosomatic phenomena like stress and anxiety. Breath connects mind and body, the yogi said a 1000 years ago. However in these eco-calyptic times where fear is the best selling currency, science tell us about earlier mass extinctions and the cycles of life in our earthly atmosphere. With scientific prose on the origins and evolution of life on the planet Tellus, written by Norwegian writer-biologist Vibeke Thorp. 

Lawrence Malstaf 
Saint-Ex

With Elusive Matter, a minimalist light and sound performance, Martin Messier transforms simple wisps of smoke into a veritable projection screen.
In a room submerged in darkness, armed with a projector as his sole source of light, Messier draws a myriad of ghostly spaces, architectural shapes and dreamlike images from the intangible haze, juxtaposing light and sound in order to conjure atmospheres both ethereal and soothing.

FIELD starts from the principle that sounds can be generated from the electromagnetic fields omnipresent in the environment. In this performance, residual electric signals, imperceptible to the eyes and ears, are picked up by electromagnetic transducer microphones and become the materials of the work. Even though they are intangible, they are subject to manipulation. On stage, Martin Messier interacts with two aluminium panels with multiple patches whose inputs and outputs are interconnected.
The sound and light composition emerges through a continuous movement of plugging and unplugging between the panels – the possibilities are endless. By his performative gestures, Martin improvises audiovisual configurations that are similar but never exactly the same.
Variations between the ambient electromagnetic flow and the connections made by the artist generate an effect of fluctuation from one performance to the next – a fluctuation that constitutes the constant of the work.
With FIELD, Messier gives material form to this otherwise inaudible, invisible flow. He becomes the operator through whom the work is activated and brought into the real world.
A veritable mimesis of electromagnetic current, the visual aspect can plunge the audience into a hypnotic state: the omnipresent imperceptible power that surrounds us is stripped of its mystery and finally seems accessible to us.
FIELD speaks to the invisible forces around us: their ascendancy and their interdependence.
Although they interact at an absolutely indiscernible level, they underlie our gestures and movements and carry us in a way.
In this sense, the work and the artist arrive together at an exchange that determines the conditions of the visual and sound elements of the performance: blinding lightning and electricity conduction.

Martin Messier
Kultūros Naktis - ELUSIVE MATTER
Kultūros Naktis - FIELD 

EXHAUST by A Two Dogs Company / Kris Verdonck is all about the execution of an internal combustion engine: over-revving a truck engine in a public space until it blows up.

While some slash car tires and some block motorways, the visual artist and theatre producer Kris Verdonck simply destroys the combustion engine. The audience is invited to join a large procession through Vienna (starting point: House of the Republic) and attend the morbid spectacle of a medieval execution. Once the charges have been read, the judgement will be enforced collectively and the monstrosity of the engine, the very symbol of progress in the twentieth century, will be destroyed in a spectacular explosion. Following Sophocles’ tragedy Ajax, where the hero errs and is deluded by the gods to kill the wrong enemy, Ajax (Exhaust) proclaims: Less is more! Progress is not endless growth. Instead of sacrificing the planet, let us sacrifice the combustion engine!

exhaust.exposed
A Two Dogs Company / Kris Verdonck
Wiener Festwochen

Abundance is a project that challenges the consumer society by finding a new value in what we regard as waste.

Inspired by our ancestors we started gathering and foraging, along the snowy roads in the north of Norway. We found thousands of broken polypropylene sticks that usually mark the edge of the road in winter.
In this immersive performance visitors are introduced to two machines that shred and melt the broken sticks into new curly red ribbons and strings. With this new building material the visitors weave a large three dimensional network through the space in a collective process.  

Along with three dancers, several guests join the evening and share controversial stories on rewilding and ownership of nature. 

Performance - installation by Lawrence Malstaf and Liv Hanne Haugen (dancer, singer) in collaboration with Rosa Los & Liel Fibak (installation / performance assistants) and the neighbours of The Radio Forest. With support of Tromsø Kommune.

Lawrence Malstaf
Festspillene i Nord Norge

Embracing the arts for systemic change, NaturArchy proposes to re-consider our imaginaries on nature and the non-human.

The exhibition probes issues of deep ecology, sustainability and the decolonisation of nature. A number of art and science works explore and query nature and law, the entanglement of human and non-human, green technologies and new materials, nature and law, ecology and economy, ancient and new knowledge. From global oceans to water flows, from contamination and bacteria to climate tipping points, pollinators, and landscapes of natural hazards; from natural and artificial intelligence to non-human values, forests, lands, soils, composting; from grief and mourning to rituals, wonder and collective action.

SEAGULL FOUNTAIN  by Lawrence Malstaf 
"Kittiwakes are a type of seagulls that are threatened with extinction due to climate change. They used to live in enormous colonies on islands far out in the arctic ocean. Recently the remaining birds are migrating to arctic cities like Tromsø in the north of Norway.
In the past 3 years the art museum has been invaded by an ever growing colony of kittiwakes. As a form of interspecies activism the birds took over the whole building with enormous noise, making hundreds of nests on window sills and ledges and spreading an intense smell. This resulted in an equally loud outcry of the people living and working in this otherwise peaceful town.
In collaboration with researchers we designed 3 light and mobile tripod structures with sculptural nesting modules on top and placed them right next to the facade. Once the birds started to make nests in their new hotels we moved them carefully away from the building, in small steps, a couple of meters per week. 95% of the colony followed and the local humans were happy too. By the end of next season we hope to arrive about 100 m further down the museum park. Here we will install 2 larger and permanent tripods that can welcome 2000 kittiwakes from other nearby buildings." Lawrence Malstaf

Lawrence Malstaf
iMAL