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

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.

Organism + Excitable Chaos is now part of the exhibition 
I am vertical (but I would rather be horizontal) 
at iMAL - Art Center for Digital Cultures & Technology
Quai des Charbonnages 30
1080 Molenbeek/Brussels (B)
Open: We-Su, 11:00 -18:00 

A 1910 Casavant pipe organ is rescued from impending gentrification at a heritage site in Montréal and brought back to life as Organism, an experimental instrument and investigative platform for stochastic patterning via turbulent processes of formation. In this acoustic solo performance, Navid Navab improvises with Organism to explore ways in which its turbulent thresholds manifest unstable timbres and intricate sonic self-organization.

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. The rescued pipes and their pneumatic architecture have been carefully modified to remove aerodynamic ‘edge-tone’ stabilizations that historically aimed to eliminate turbulent flow and its uncontrollable sound world.

During the concert, Organism’s slowly-shifting metastable states allow for the pipes’ energetic thresholds to transductively fall into and out of compatibility with one another, turning each pipe into a vortex-shedding, edge-tone jumping, theatre of spectra and tone. With no digital sounds, Navab aerodynamically shapes the resulting ecology of interdependent timbres into emergent realms, traversing microsonic polyrhythms, post-rock overspill and swampy soundscapes.
The performance is a solo acoustic concert for robotically prepared historic organ.

Organism: In Turbulence

In 2009, Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf received the Golden Nica in the Interactive Art category for his immersive installation Nemo Observatorium 02002. His piece—an arresting vortex of Styrofoam beads blown by powerful fans into a transparent cylinder—framed an armchair at its center. Within the whirlwind, the seated viewer experiences a serene still-point, a moment of calm and clarity amid sensory chaos. The work eloquently meditates on presence, grounding, and perception of time in a rapidly shifting environment.

Lawrence Malstaf also performed SHRINK 01995 at Ars Electronica at the occasion of this Golden Nica in 2009.

Lawrence Malstaf

In 2015, Belgian artist Alex Verhaest received the Golden Nica for Temps Mort / Idle Times in the Computer Animation category. This work blends medieval iconography with interactive video elements—audience members triggered character monologues via phone—exploring themes of communication breakdown and collective memory.

In 2022, Alex Verhaest received Honorary Mention for her interactive philosophical game Ad Hominem in the Computer Animation category at Prix Ars Electronica. The project is a reflective choose‑your‑own‑adventure inspired by Sofie Verhaest’s doctoral thesis, casting “Change” as a character navigating ideological dialogues. A digital narrative labyrinth of collectivism, individualism, progressivism, and conservatism highlights that transformation is rarely welcomed.

Alex Verhaest

In 2012 David Bowen received a Honorary Mention for Interactive Art for his installation fly tweet. This device sends twitter messages based on the activities of a collection of houseflies. The flies live inside an acrylic sphere along with a computer keyboard. As the flies move and interact inside their home, they fly over the keys on the keyboard. These movements are collected in real-time via video. When a particular key is triggered by the flies, the key’s corresponding character is entered into a twitter text box. When 140 characters are reached or the flies trigger the “enter” key, the message containing the accumulated characters is tweeted. Thus live twitter messages are perpetually sent in real-time based on the simple movements of the community of houseflies. These constantly accumulating messages appear as records of random activity within the larger sphere of social media and networking.

In 2013, David Bowen participated at the Ars Electronica exhibition with his installations tele-present wind and in 2017 with fly AI.

tele-present wind consists of a series of  x/y tilting mechanical devices connected to thin dried plant stalks installed in a gallery and a dried plant stalk connected to an accelerometer installed outdoors. When the wind blows it causes the stalk outside to sway. The accelerometer detects this movement transmitting the motion to the grouping of devices in the gallery. Therefore the stalks in the gallery space move in real-time and in unison based on the movement of the wind outside.
fly AI creates a situation where the fate of a colony of living houseflies is determined by the accuracy of artificial intelligence software. The installation uses the TensorFlow machine learning image recognition library to classify images of live houseflies. As the flies fly and land in front of a camera, their image is captured. The captured image is classified by the image recognition software and a list of guessed items is ranked 1 through 5. Each of the items is assigned a percentage based on how likely the software thinks that the listed item is what it sees. If “fly” is ranked number 1 on the list, a pump delivers water and nutrients to the colony based on the percentage of the ranking. If “fly” is not ranked number 1 the pump does not deliver water and nutrients to the colony. The system is setup to run indefinitely with an indeterminate outcome.

David Bowen

In 2011, Martin Messier in collaboration with Nicolas Bernier received an Honorary mention on the category of Digital Musics & Sound Art for La chambre des machines.

La chambre des machines was born of a desire to return to the physical world in a world where digital tools are omnipresent. The performance, imagined by Martin Messier in collaboration with Nicolas Bernier, also makes reference to intonarumoris, sound machines built by Italian Futurists such as Luigi Russolo in the early 20th century.
Machines made of gears and cranks are manipulated to produce a sound construction at the crossroads of acoustics and electronics. Immersed in surround sound, audiences discover the interaction between mechanical and synthetic sound. Thanks to specially adapted programming, digital processing expands the sound palette of the machines.
La chambre des machines is a subtle tribute to sound creation and a reminder of the historicity of media: just like today's computers, these machines contained mysterious mechanisms.

In 2018, Martin Messier presented his performance Field at Ars Electronica.
Field is based on the idea that sounds can emerge from the electromagnetic fields that are omnipresent in our environment. This performance reveals these invisible forces, essential and imperceptible to the eye and ear, which orchestrate our gestures and movements.
Residual electrical signals are picked up by electromagnetic transducer microphones. Recorded beforehand, they then become Martin Messier's raw materials. On stage, the artist interacts with two aluminum panels, linked by a network of cables that he continually connects and disconnects, generating a choreography of sound and light. From these repeated gestures, a hypnotic composition emerges. Evolving in an infinite loop, each iteration, though familiar, is different. The visual power of the work, evoked by electrical conduction and lightning-like flashes of light, plunges viewers into a state of fascination. This revelation of electromagnetic forces brings us closer to their mystery, making the inaccessible tangible.
With surgical synchronization of light and sound, and shadow effects that animate a constantly changing landscape, Field is a landmark project in Martin Messier's artistic research.

Martin Messier