Presentations

Festival International Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, Victoriaville, QC 2021 (Concert version only)

Mois Multi, La Nef, Quebec City QC 2024

Biennale ELEKTRA, Arsenal Contemporary Arts Gallery, Montreal, QC 2024 Theme: “Illusion”

Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria, 2024 Theme: “Hope, who will turn the tide”

Description

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 behaviour it highlights how, in nature, events occurring at even the smallest scales of magnitude compel emergent behaviours whose next states are unknown.

The generative movement of Excitable Chaos conducts Organism’s sonic behaviour. The resulting turbulent sonifications of chaos serve as meditations on the cascading sense of more-than-oneness that develops spontaneously in nature, at the brink of unfolding futures.

Credits

NAVID NAVAB | GARNET WILLIS

NAVID NAVAB
Concept Composition Sculpture, Programming, Design, Electronics, Sonification.

GARNET WILLIS
Engineering, Design, Sculpture, Electronics.

Research partners: SAT Montréal with Québec ministry of Innovation, Topological Media Lab with Fonds de Recherche du Québec, X-IO Technologies UK, Salon Richmond 1861.

Assistance: Charles Bicari, Camille Desjardins, Asa Perlman, Jean-Michaël Celerier, Philippe Vandal, Eric L’Ecuyer

Residency: Recto-Verso, Hexagram, Milieux Institute

Support: Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Conseil des arts de Montréal