Navid Navab (IR/CA) explores an experimental approach to organ sounds with his performance Organism: In Turbulence, that won the Golden Nica at the 2025 Prix Ars Electronica. Based in Montreal, they challenge conventional ideas of classical church music. The installation will be on display at Mariendom throughout the festival, with additional performative interventions to look forward to. 

Organism: In Turbulence (performance)
Solo concert with a century-old pipe organ prepared robotically to sound turbulent patterning.

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.  

Mariendom, Linz (AT)

Openingconcert 
Wednesday 3 September 2025
19:30 - 22:30

Saturday 6 September 2025
12:30 - 13:30

Saturday 6 September 2025
20:00 - 21:00

Organism + Excitable Chaos
Navid Navab (IR/CA), with Garnet Willis (CA)

This year’s Golden Nica in the category “Digital Musics & Sound Art” goes to media artist Navid Navab and Garnet Willis for their project “Organism”.

Anyone who was in the POSTCITY bunker during last year’s Ars Electronica Festival may remember that moment. The humming in your chest, the rattling of the technology, the archaic sound creeping through the concrete. “Organism” by Navid Navab and Garnet Willis was no ordinary piece of music. It was an experience, raw, expansive, almost eerie. And above all: difficult to forget. No wonder, then, that the work has now been awarded the Golden Nica in the “Digital Musics & Sound Art” category.

This category is one of the most traditional at the Prix Ars Electronica. Ars Electronica introduced the category for computer music back in 1987—a bold move long before electronic sounds were commonplace in the art world. Since then, the field has developed rapidly: from algorithmically generated music and hybrid compositions to immersive soundscapes that challenge and expand our listening habits.

But what makes “Organism” so special? And what role does chaos play in a work that seems so precisely programmed? In conversation with Navid Navab, we dive into a world where machines breathe, organ pipes whisper, and order is just an illusion. 

Read interview

Organism + Excitable Chaos (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. 

Mariendom, Linz (AT)

Thursday 4 September 2025
10:00 – 17:30

Friday 5 September 2025
10:00 – 17:30

Sunday 7 September 2025
12:30 – 18:00

Prix Ars Electronica 2025
Golden Nica – Digital Musics & Sound Art

Futures Entangled: Material Intelligence, Memory & Movement
Istanbul Digital Art Festival (IDAF)

The exhibition Futures Entangled: Material Intelligence, Memory & Movement, presented within the framework of the Ars Electronica festival’s PANIC – yes/no theme, offers a narrative that weaves together the urgencies of migration and ecological crisis. Through installation and data artworks, it explores the emotional, material, and technological dimensions of displacement, adaptation, and survival.

This work invites audiences into an environment where speculative ecologies, nonhuman data, and alternative systems of exchange come to life—proposing new sensibilities for how we sense, share, and sustain in a rapidly transforming world. By engaging with both planetary and personal scales of crisis, the work asks: How do we navigate panic—not just as fear, but as a potential for transformation?

tele-present wind (Mars wind version)

This installation by David Bowen is a collaboration with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The piece consists of a series of 84 x/y tilting mechanical devices connected to tall dried grass stalks, installed like a field in the gallery. The mechanisms will tilt, move and sway based on data collected from the wind sensor on the Perseverance Mars rover.

Dr. José A Rodríguez-Manfredi, lead scientist on the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer on Perseverance, assisted in collecting the wind data for the project. That data is mapped to the movement of the mechanisms. Thus, the individual components of the installation here on earth will move in unison as they mimic the direction and intensity of the wind from another planet.