ORGANISM + EXCITABLE CHAOS
The artist
NAVID NAVAB:
These art-machines probe matter suspended in metastable states, where thermodynamic reservoirs of indeterminacy generate cybernetic intentionality. Making the imperceptible palpable, the works attune their publics to forms of life at the pre metabolic border between breathing and not breathing.
Navab's exhibitions, concerts, and interventions circulate internationally at festivals and venues including MaerzMusik Berlin, Kapelica Gallery Ljubljana, 798CUBE Beijing, Biennale Némo Paris, Rewire The Hague, Sonica Glasgow, device_art Zagreb, and ELEKTRA Montréal.
GARNET WILLIS:
Garnet Willis (CA) is an interdisciplinary artist, audio-engineer and instrument builder. He combines his disparate skills as designer, wood and metal-worker, sound engineer and electronics geek to produce multivariate artworks that tend to revolve around sound. His interests sit at the crossroads between sensation, form over time, sentient matter, and material agency. He enjoys team collaborations - especially when he gets to design and build new types of lively and challenging objects.
Gallery
About the work
ORGANISM + EXCITABLE CHAOS
The chaotic motion of Excitable Chaos, a robotically-steered triple pendulum, drives the aerodynamic thresholds of Organism, a robotically-prepared century-old pipe organ. A 1910 Casavant pipe-organ is rescued from impending gentrification at a heritage site in Montréal and robotically prepared to sound turbulent formations. Organism destabilizes the socio-historical tonality of the organ to liberate its hidden turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic repression. Animated by the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy between its three moving arms, Excitable Chaos occasionally modulates its own pivotal joints and damper weights, thereby shifting the mass‐orbital relationships between its arms.
These mass modulations enact unique chaotic movement systems, each a stochastic universe unto itself, while highlighting how, in nature, even the subtlest variations are key contributors to cohesive behaviors, whose next states are unknowable.
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 cascading sense of more-than oneness that spontaneously develop in life and nature and how this wild yet steerable relationality can help us express worlds yet unknown.
NAVID NAVAB
Artistic direction, concept, composition, sculpture, design, programming, electronics, sonification
GARNET WILLIS
Engineering, design, electronics, sculpture
Consultants
Camille Desjardins (electronics fabrication), Charles Bicari + SAT Montréal (pendulum robotics firmware), Jean-Michaël Celerier (IoT/C++)
Residencies
Werktank · iii · iMAL · Recto-Verso · Hexagram · Ateliers Belleville
Production
Transductive Formations (navidnavab.com/company)
Financial Support
Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, Conseil des Arts de Montréal, Québec Ministry of Innovation, Fonds de Recherche du Québec
