Organism + Excitable Chaos

Organism + Excitable Chaos / Navid Navab, with Garnet Willis - Photo: Miha Godec

Prix Ars Electronica Exhibition / For Music Lovers

Exhibit

Organism + Excitable Chaos

Navid Navab (IR/CA), with Garnet Willis (CA)

Organism is a new instrument reconstructed from a century-old Casavant pipe organ using robotics technology. By combining it with a robot-controlled triple pendulum system called Excitable Chaos, it unleashes the organ’s turbulent materiality and releases tones that have been suppressed for centuries. The pipes chosen for the work are those that exhibit the highest degree of instability, “edge-tone jumping” to sound intermittently even the subtlest fluctuations. Designed to produce unpredictable compositional futures, Excitable Chaos is animated by the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy between its three moving arms. The generative movement of Excitable Chaos conducts Organism’s aerodynamic thresholds, drawing kinetic chaos into dialogue with sonic turbulence. The resulting sonifications of chaos serve as meditations on the sense of more-than-oneness that spontaneously emerges in life and nature, and how this wild yet steerable relationality can help us express worlds yet unknown.

Prix Ars Electronica 2025 
Golden Nica – Digital Musics & Sound Art

St. Mary's Cathedral
Thu 4. Sep 2025 10:00 – 17:30
Fri 5. Sep 2025 10:00 – 17:30
Sun 7. Sep 2025 12:30 – 18:00

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  • Organism: In Turbulence

    Navid Navab (IR/CA)

    A concert with a historic organ, robotically prepared to surf upon the self-organizing tendency of its turbulent formations. Navab aerodynamically shapes the resulting ecology of interdependent timbres into emergent realms, traversing microsonic polyrhythms, post-rock overspill and swampy soundscapes.

  • Photo: Elisa Sibert

    Navid Navab

    Navid Navab is an antidisciplinary composer with a background in contemporary music, biomedical sonification, and philosophical biology. 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 their excitable dynamics.

  • Photo: Anna Semenova Kozak

    Garnet Willis

    Garnet Willis is an interdisciplinary artist, audio-engineer, designer, and instrument builder. Garnet’s research investigates the crossroads between sensation, form over time, sentient matter, and material agency. He combines his disparate skills to produce multivariate artworks that tend to revolve around sound. He develops shapeshifting sculptures that utilize complex material calculations driven by internal stresses resulting in unpredictable, real-time changes in physical form.

Credits

Concept, direction, composition, sculpture, programming, design, electronics, sonification: Navid Navab | Sculpture, lead design, electronics, engineering: Garnet Willis | Production: Transductive Formations (www.navidnavab.com/company) | Assistance: Camille Desjardins, Charles Bicari, Jean-Michaël Celerier, Philippe Vandal, Asa Perlman, Evan Montpellier, Eric L'Ecuyer | Research Partners: SAT Montréal with Québec Ministry of Innovation (Pendulum microcontroller IoT), Topological Media Lab with Fonds de Recherche du Québec, X-IO Technologies UK (Pendulum IMU Sensor node, Sensor Fusion Research) | Residencies: Werktank, Recto-Verso, Hexagram, Milieux, III | With support from: Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Conseil des arts de Montréal