EXHAUST at Transart Festival Bolzano
12.09.2024 Transart Festival
Bolzano (IT)
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.
A marching crowd, a motor engine, an execution: the opening of the 24th edition of Transart will be literally explosive. Visual artist and theatre director Kris Verdonck invites us to march together through the streets of Bolzano to the site where a trial and death sentence will be carried out in the style of a medieval execution.
This is a procession to the gallows not for a person, but rather for an everyday object: the internal combustion engine. Normally hidden from view, it’s a symbol of the insane technical progress known to mankind during the 21st century, but also of the ecological catastrophes gripping the planet. EXHAUST re-enacts the format of a medieval execution. The accused—in this case, the internal combustion engine—is dragged through the city at the head of a procession, beginning at the OASIE Transart in Via Dante. After a reading of the accused's crimes and condemnations—such as the unfulfilled promises of endless progress and growth—the death sentence is carried out. The performance follows the methods of Greek tragedies, Japanese Nō theatre or Shakespeare: mythological sacrifice as a violent ritual to resolve conflict; brutal violence as a purifying force.
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
1 DROP 1000 YEARS at MUTEK
24.08.2024 MUTEK - A/VISIONS 2
Montreal, Quebec (CA)
Martin Messier's 1 drop 1000 years is an immersive audiovisual performance, portraying the critical yet fragile role of the thermohaline circulation system. Using advanced technology, Messier captures the essence of global currents, emphasizing their delicate balance and the urgent human impact on climate regulation.
Cycles at MUTEK Montreal
15.08.2024 - 29.08.2023 MUTEK
Montreal, Quebec (CA)
Cycles is an installation where everyone is invited to become aware of the relationships linking cyclical and unpredictable phenomena. These dialogues are also found in the sound space: the tuned engines envelop the music diffused with their elusive timbres and draw this landscape in which the harmony is built as much by its power as by its vulnerability.
SHRINK 01995 at NOVUM Newcastle Summer Festival
08.08.2024 - 11.08.2024 NOVUM 2024
Newcastle (UK)
SHRINK 01995 - Two large, transparent plastic sheets and a device that gradually sucks the air out from between them leave the body vacuum-packed and vertically suspended. The transparent tube inserted between the two surfaces allows the person inside the installation to regulate the flow of air. As a result of the increasing pressure between the plastic sheets, the surface of the packed body gradually freezes into multiple micro-folds. For the duration of the performance the person inside moves slowly and changes positions, which vary from an almost embryonic position to one resembling a crucified body.
At NOVUM Newcastle Summer Festival there will be 4 Shrinks and the bodies of 4 performers.
Photography by Martin Argyroglo at Nuit Blanche Paris 2023.
46°41'58.365" lat. -91°59'49.0128" long. @ 30m
06.08.2024 - 30.06.2025 Light Art Museum Budapest
Budapest (HU)
46°41'58.365" lat. -91°59'49.0128" long. @ 30m refers to the source location where the water surface data was collected for this series. An autonomous aerial vehicle hovering 30 meters above Lake Superior captured still images of the water’s surface. For this series of five, the vehicle was deployed to the same location on different days and in different weather conditions. The collected images were converted into three-dimensional models using open source software. The models were then carved with a CNC router into a series of clear acrylic cylinders. This process captured the dynamic movements of the waves and ripples from a specific time and location and suspended this ever-changing water pattern into a static transparent form.
SHRINK 01995 at Baltoscandal 2024
06.07.2024 Baltoscandal
Rakvere (EST)
SHRINK 01995 - Two large, transparent plastic sheets and a device that gradually sucks the air out from between them leave the body vacuum-packed and vertically suspended. The transparent tube inserted between the two surfaces allows the person inside the installation to regulate the flow of air. As a result of the increasing pressure between the plastic sheets, the surface of the packed body gradually freezes into multiple micro-folds. For the duration of the performance the person inside moves slowly and changes positions, which vary from an almost embryonic position to one resembling a crucified body.
At Baltoscandal 2024 there will be 3 Shrinks and the bodies of 3 performers.
Photography by Martin Argyroglo at Nuit Blanche Paris 2023.
Abundance - Première
26.06.2024 Festspillene i Nord Norge
Hartstad (NO)
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.
EXHAUST
22.06.2024 Wiener Festwochen
Vienna (AT)
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!
EXHALE 01998 - 02004
06.06.2024 - 12.06.2024 Saint-Ex, Culture numérique
Reims (F)
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.