Organism
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Organism is an investigative platform that attunes us to the form-giving tendencies of kinetic chaos and the turbulent dynamics of sonic formation. It has two modes of presentation: a concert Organism: in Turbulence and an installation Organism + Excitable Chaos.
Organism: In Turbulence
Navid Navab (performance)
Solo concert with a century-old pipe organ prepared robotically to sound turbulent formations
Organism dismantles the socio‑historical tonality of the organ—civilization’s triumph over the turbulence of nature—to liberate its hidden turbulent materiality. A 1910 Casavant pipe organ, rescued from impending gentrification at a heritage site in Montreal, has had its pneumatic architecture modified to remove stabilizations that historically aimed to eliminate turbulent flow and its uncontrollable sound world, unleashing long-repressed timbres to be heard anew after centuries of sonic repression.
Organism’s compositionally-shifting metastable states allow for the pipes’ energetic thresholds to fall into and out of compatibility with one another, turning each pipe into a “vortex-shedding” theater of spectra and tone. The pipes that have been chosen for the work are those that exhibit the highest degree of instability, “edge-tone jumping” to discontinuously sound even the subtlest fluctuations, bringing the energetic interdependencies of the system to the sensory realm. In this network of relations, even minute shifts in the position of a servo motor shaping the flow of air within a pipe can result in dramatic and discontinuous changes in the sound we hear.
During concerts, an array of gestural controllers provide a connection to Organism’s wild temporality. Immersed in this acoustic ecology, Navab surfs upon turbulent waves to steer unstable timbres toward sonic self-organization, traversing microsonic polyrhythms, post-rock overspill, and swampy soundscapes.
Organism + Excitable Chaos
Navid Navab, with Garnet Willis (installation)
A robotically prepared historic pipe organ driven by a robotically-steered chaotic pendulum.
The chaotic motion of Excitable Chaos, a robotically-steered triple pendulum, drives the aerodynamic thresholds of Organism, a robotically-prepared century-old pipe organ.
Designed to produce unpredictable compositional futures, Excitable Chaos is animated by the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy between its three moving arms. Sliding pivotal joints shift the system’s larger gravitational dynamics, while subtle adjustments to damper weights refine its kinetic resonances, phases, and grooves. These modulations allow Excitable Chaos to continuously enact chaotic movement systems, each a stochastic universe of its own, while highlighting how, in nature, even at the smallest scales of magnitude, events are key contributors to cohesive but emergent behaviors, whose next states are unknowable.
Integral to Excitable Chaos is a one-of-a-kind electromagnetic driver which adds precise bursts of energy to its rotational momentum, replenishing any energy that has been lost to friction (entropic loss), while interfering to the least possible degree with the chaotic movement (its negentropic source of liveliness), arising from the interplay of the three pendulum arms, as they express their material computation.
Excitable Chaos’s transductive dance with gravity (its energetic tensions, correlations, and upheavals continuously shaping and unshaping excitable worlds) is wirelessly sensed and data‑sculpted to reveal its inner liveliness. By channeling this stream of “lively” data, the generative movement of Excitable Chaos can conduct Organism’s aerodynamic thresholds, drawing kinetic chaos into conversation with sonic turbulence. Each undulation opens an indeterminate cycle of cascading oscillations, while over time chaotic attractors establish self‑similar grooves. The resulting turbulent sonifications of chaos serve as meditations on how a cascading sense of more-than-oneness may spontaneously develop in life and nature and how this wild yet steerable relationality can help us express worlds yet unknown.
Organism is an investigative platform that attunes us to the form-giving tendencies of kinetic chaos and the turbulent dynamics of sonic formation. It has two modes of presentation: a concert Organism: in Turbulence and an installation Organism + Excitable Chaos.
Organism: In Turbulence
Navid Navab (performance)
Solo concert with a century-old pipe organ prepared robotically to sound turbulent formations
Organism dismantles the socio‑historical tonality of the organ—civilization’s triumph over the turbulence of nature—to liberate its hidden turbulent materiality. A 1910 Casavant pipe organ, rescued from impending gentrification at a heritage site in Montreal, has had its pneumatic architecture modified to remove stabilizations that historically aimed to eliminate turbulent flow and its uncontrollable sound world, unleashing long-repressed timbres to be heard anew after centuries of sonic repression.
Organism’s compositionally-shifting metastable states allow for the pipes’ energetic thresholds to fall into and out of compatibility with one another, turning each pipe into a “vortex-shedding” theater of spectra and tone. The pipes that have been chosen for the work are those that exhibit the highest degree of instability, “edge-tone jumping” to discontinuously sound even the subtlest fluctuations, bringing the energetic interdependencies of the system to the sensory realm. In this network of relations, even minute shifts in the position of a servo motor shaping the flow of air within a pipe can result in dramatic and discontinuous changes in the sound we hear.
During concerts, an array of gestural controllers provide a connection to Organism’s wild temporality. Immersed in this acoustic ecology, Navab surfs upon turbulent waves to steer unstable timbres toward sonic self-organization, traversing microsonic polyrhythms, post-rock overspill, and swampy soundscapes.
Organism + Excitable Chaos
Navid Navab, with Garnet Willis (installation)
A robotically prepared historic pipe organ driven by a robotically-steered chaotic pendulum.
The chaotic motion of Excitable Chaos, a robotically-steered triple pendulum, drives the aerodynamic thresholds of Organism, a robotically-prepared century-old pipe organ.
Designed to produce unpredictable compositional futures, Excitable Chaos is animated by the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy between its three moving arms. Sliding pivotal joints shift the system’s larger gravitational dynamics, while subtle adjustments to damper weights refine its kinetic resonances, phases, and grooves. These modulations allow Excitable Chaos to continuously enact chaotic movement systems, each a stochastic universe of its own, while highlighting how, in nature, even at the smallest scales of magnitude, events are key contributors to cohesive but emergent behaviors, whose next states are unknowable.
Integral to Excitable Chaos is a one-of-a-kind electromagnetic driver which adds precise bursts of energy to its rotational momentum, replenishing any energy that has been lost to friction (entropic loss), while interfering to the least possible degree with the chaotic movement (its negentropic source of liveliness), arising from the interplay of the three pendulum arms, as they express their material computation.
Excitable Chaos’s transductive dance with gravity (its energetic tensions, correlations, and upheavals continuously shaping and unshaping excitable worlds) is wirelessly sensed and data‑sculpted to reveal its inner liveliness. By channeling this stream of “lively” data, the generative movement of Excitable Chaos can conduct Organism’s aerodynamic thresholds, drawing kinetic chaos into conversation with sonic turbulence. Each undulation opens an indeterminate cycle of cascading oscillations, while over time chaotic attractors establish self‑similar grooves. The resulting turbulent sonifications of chaos serve as meditations on how a cascading sense of more-than-oneness may spontaneously develop in life and nature and how this wild yet steerable relationality can help us express worlds yet unknown.
www.navidnavab.com/organism-in-turbulence
www.navidnavab.com/organism-excitable-chaos
garnetwillis.com/
Concept, direction, composition, sculpture, programming, design, electronics, sonification (installation), performance (concert): Navid Navab Sculpture, lead design, electronics, engineering, energetics: Garnet Willis
Assistance: Camille Desjardins, Charles Bicari, Jean-Michaël Celerier, Philippe Vandal, Asa Perlman, Evan Montpellier, Eric L'Ecuyer
Production: Transductive Formations (www.navidnavab.com/company)
Research: SAT Montreal with Quebec 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
Navid Navab (IR/CA) is an antidisciplinary composer and a media alchemist 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. Navab’s art-machines sculpturally engage with transductive structures of liveliness, probing the excitable tendencies of matter—suspended in metastable states where thermodynamic reservoirs of indeterminacy generate cybernetic intentionality. Making the imperceptible palpable, 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.
Garnet Willis (CA) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, audio engineer, and instrument builder. His interests sit at the crossroads between sensation, form over time, sentient matter, and material agency. He has a keen interest in exploring the way in which energetics and materiality entwine to create surprising outcomes and combines a broad range of skills across many disciplines to produce multivariate artworks which tend to revolve around sound. His shapeshifting sculptures utilize complex material calculations driven by internal stresses resulting in unpredictable, real-time changes in physical form.
Navid Navab (IR/CA) is an antidisciplinary composer and a media alchemist 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. Navab’s art-machines sculpturally engage with transductive structures of liveliness, probing the excitable tendencies of matter—suspended in metastable states where thermodynamic reservoirs of indeterminacy generate cybernetic intentionality. Making the imperceptible palpable, 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.
Garnet Willis (CA) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, audio engineer, and instrument builder. His interests sit at the crossroads between sensation, form over time, sentient matter, and material agency. He has a keen interest in exploring the way in which energetics and materiality entwine to create surprising outcomes and combines a broad range of skills across many disciplines to produce multivariate artworks which tend to revolve around sound. His shapeshifting sculptures utilize complex material calculations driven by internal stresses resulting in unpredictable, real-time changes in physical form.
In Organism (Ιn Turbulence/performance + Excitable Chaos/installation), Navid Navab and Garnet Willis invite us into a living, sonic ecology—an environment in which sound becomes an emergent, relational force. A century-old Casavant pipe organ—long associated with rigidity, control, and Western sacred music—is re-animated through a choreography of kinetic gestures in the attempt to deconstruct the socio-historical tonality of this instrument. Robotically prepared and intimately entangled with a chaotic triple pendulum, the instrument no longer obeys the dictates of a human performer but slowly deconstructs new timbres and sonic nuances.
The work unfolds as a continuously evolving encounter between a historical artifact and nonlinear material objects found today. Sound is not composed in the traditional sense but arises through friction, drift, and transductive resonance. The pendulum’s gravitational system triggers delicate sonic responses—shimmering, unpredictable, and emergent—inviting the audience into an experience of instability, chance, and emergence.
The philosophical and technological precision of the work, and by its openness to chaos—not as noise, but as a generative collaborator, became a key aspect for the jury’s decision.
Organism foreground a new form of listening: one that welcomes indeterminacy and entanglement, allowing material intelligence to speak in its own time and voice.
When thinking of the historical context, the work subtly taps into the colonial legacies of the pipe organ—an instrument historically ejected into public spaces through the spread of Christianity. As a tool of both spiritual authority and sonic domination, the organ was used to regulate time, to structure behavior, and to suppress indigenous musical traditions. By promoting European musical aesthetics, colonizers aimed to overwrite local cultures, installing the organ as a mechanism of cultural assimilation. It seems that, Organism become a subversive apparatus—an act of sonic reclamation. Through the radical recontextualization, the artists dismantle the organ’s fixed authority and repurpose it to a state of responsive, chaotic life. This is not simply a reinvention of an instrument, but a re-imagining of time, space, and historical memory. The jury recognizes the work as a profound and poetic gesture—an invitation to listen differently, and to reclaim what was silenced through resonance, care, and embodied presence.
In Organism (Ιn Turbulence/performance + Excitable Chaos/installation), Navid Navab and Garnet Willis invite us into a living, sonic ecology—an environment in which sound becomes an emergent, relational force. A century-old Casavant pipe organ—long associated with rigidity, control, and Western sacred music—is re-animated through a choreography of kinetic gestures in the attempt to deconstruct the socio-historical tonality of this instrument. Robotically prepared and intimately entangled with a chaotic triple pendulum, the instrument no longer obeys the dictates of a human performer but slowly deconstructs new timbres and sonic nuances.
The work unfolds as a continuously evolving encounter between a historical artifact and nonlinear material objects found today. Sound is not composed in the traditional sense but arises through friction, drift, and transductive resonance. The pendulum’s gravitational system triggers delicate sonic responses—shimmering, unpredictable, and emergent—inviting the audience into an experience of instability, chance, and emergence.
The philosophical and technological precision of the work, and by its openness to chaos—not as noise, but as a generative collaborator, became a key aspect for the jury’s decision.
Organism foreground a new form of listening: one that welcomes indeterminacy and entanglement, allowing material intelligence to speak in its own time and voice.
When thinking of the historical context, the work subtly taps into the colonial legacies of the pipe organ—an instrument historically ejected into public spaces through the spread of Christianity. As a tool of both spiritual authority and sonic domination, the organ was used to regulate time, to structure behavior, and to suppress indigenous musical traditions. By promoting European musical aesthetics, colonizers aimed to overwrite local cultures, installing the organ as a mechanism of cultural assimilation. It seems that, Organism become a subversive apparatus—an act of sonic reclamation. Through the radical recontextualization, the artists dismantle the organ’s fixed authority and repurpose it to a state of responsive, chaotic life. This is not simply a reinvention of an instrument, but a re-imagining of time, space, and historical memory. The jury recognizes the work as a profound and poetic gesture—an invitation to listen differently, and to reclaim what was silenced through resonance, care, and embodied presence.