Winner of Golden Nica Digital Musics & Sound Art 2025: Organism by Navid Navab in collaboration with Garnet Willis
07.07.2025 Prix Ars Electronica 2025
Linz (AT)
The Prix Ars Electronica is the world’s most established competition for media art. Since 1987, it has honored pioneers who realize inspiring projects at the intersection of art, technology, and society. In 2025, the competition received 3,987 submissions from 98 countries across four categories. The four winners have now been selected and will be awarded the coveted Golden Nica as well as up to 10,000 euros in prize money.
In the category Digital Musics & Sound Art (1,127 submissions), Navid Navab (IR/CA) and Garnet Willis (CA) are honored for their project Organism. At its center is a robotically modified organ that breaks free from the rigid patterns of prescribed sacred music and embraces uncontrollable soundscapes.
„A century-old Casavant pipe organ—long associated with rigidity, control, and Western sacred music—is reanimated 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. […] 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.“
Over the years, Navid Navab presented already several installations & performances in the context of Ars Electronica: Practices of Everyday Life | Cooking and Aquaphoneia in 2016, ⋗ tangibleFlux φ plenumorphic ∴ chaosmosis in 2018 and last year Organism + Excitable Chaos in 2024.
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.
Read interview with Navid Navab: "Sound as a living process"
Navid Navab
Organism + Excitable Chaos
Organism: in Turbulence
Organism + Excitable Chaos at iMAL Brussels
01.06.2025 - 21.09.2025 iMAL, Art Center for Digital Cultures & Technology
Brussels (B)
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 patterning. Organism destabilizes the socio-historical tonality of the organ to liberate and sound its hidden turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic restraint. 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 modulations allow the artist to enact unique chaotic movement systems, each a stochastic universe unto itself, while highlighting how even the subtlest variations are key contributors to cohesive behavior, whose next state is rendered unknown.
The exhibition I am vertical (but I would rather be horizontal) reflects on iMAL’s 25 years of history and looks towards its future as an institution dedicated to digital cultures, at a time when computation is increasingly scrutinised for its social and environmental impact.
More than a retrospective, this ‘introspective’ combines artworks previously shown at iMAL with more recent creations. Together, they celebrate a rich aesthetic diversity outside of Silicon Valley’s monoculture. It is a moment to pause and evaluate the value of past, current and future digital art. The exhibition is named after Sylvia Plath’s poem I am vertical, in which she contemplates her own existence, by evoking the disconnect between her human verticality and her profound desire to be horizontal, in harmony and connected with nature.
Digital culture is inextricably linked to the production of e-waste and increasing land, resource, energy and water use. It also has social and political ramifications such as the impact of generative AI on labour and that of surveillance on privacy and democracy. Big Tech monoculture promotes consumerism while obfuscating its social and ecological impact. What does that mean for artists working with digital media ?
The works in I am Vertical (but I would rather be horizontal) offer a space to reflect on the possibility of digital cultures that do not seek to scale at the expense of planetary boundaries, and instead embrace limits as opportunity to reclaim creativity.
At the occasion of the opening of I am vertical (but I would rather be horizontal), Navid Navab will present a short performance of Organism: In Turbulence on Tuesday 1 July 2025 at 21:00