Organism & Excitable Chaos at Biennale ELEKTRA - Illusion
31.05.2024 - 21.07.2024 Arsenal Contemporary Art
Montréal, Quebec (CA)
Organism and Excitable Chaos by Navid Navab in collaboration with Garnet Willis
The exhibit probes into nature’s form-giving tendencies by putting kinetic chaos in conversation with sonic turbulence. Organism is an investigative platform for stochastic co-patterning via the sono-ecological indeterminacy of turbulent processes of formation. It dismantles the far-too-clean tones of the pipe organ in order to excite its turbulent materiality, unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic repression.
Excitable Chaos co-directs chaotic patterns by modulating the transductive resonances of a triple pendulum, a physical system with nonlinear behaviour due to the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy among its moving elements. It highlights one of the more spectacular ways in which nature demonstrates how even the smallest scales of magnitude are key contributors to an overall behavior whose next state is rendered unknown. Excitable Chaos's generative movement is sensed and mapped to drive the turbulent sonic thresholds of Organism.
Organism at Mois Multi
01.02.2024 - 11.02.2024 Mois Multi
Québec (CA)
ORGANISM
In collaboration with Garnet Willis
Centered around a robotically prepared century-old pipe organ, Organism is an investigative platform for stochastic co-patterning via the sono-ecological indeterminacy of turbulent processes of formation.
A Casavant pipe organ built in 1910 is brought back to life after being removed from the indifference of gentrification at a heritage site in Sud-Ouest, Montreal. Organism dismantles the far-too-clean tones of the pipe organ—that reductive triumph of Western civilization over the turbulence of nature—in order to excite the natural turbulent materiality hidden within the heart of its sound-generating process.
The rescued pipes, along with their pneumatic architecture, have been carefully modified to remove stabilizations which historically aimed to eliminate turbulent flow and its uncontrolled sound world, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic repression.