Organism: In Turbulence: Golden Nica at Ars Electronica
03.09.2025 - 07.09.2025 Ars Electronica
Mariendom, Linz AT)
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 St. Mary’s Cathedral throughout the festival, with additional performative interventions to look forward to.
Organism: In Turbulence
Solo concert with a century-old pipe organ prepared robotically to sound turbulent patterning
Organism destabilizes the socio-historical tonality of the organ to liberate its turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic repression. In concerts, Organism’s shifting metastable states allow for its energetic thresholds to fall into and out of compatibility with one another. Navab aerodynamically shapes the resulting ecology of interdependent timbres into emergent realms, traversing microsonic polyrhythms, post-rock overspill and swampy soundscapes.
Mariendom, Linz (AT)
Openingconcert Wednesday 3 September 2025 - 19:30
Saturday 6 September - 12:30 - 13:30
Saturday 6 September - 20:00 - 21:00
Organism + Excitable Chaos: Golden Nica at Ars Electronica
03.09.2025 - 07.09.2025 Prix Ars Electronica Exhibition
Mariendom, Linz (AT)
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 is a new instrument reconstructed from a century-old Casavant pipe organ using robotics technology. By combining it with a robot-controlled triple pendulum system called Excitable Chaos, it unleashes the organ’s turbulent materiality and releases tones that have been suppressed for centuries. The pipes chosen for the work are those that exhibit the highest degree of instability, “edge-tone jumping” to sound intermittently even the subtlest fluctuations. Designed to produce unpredictable compositional futures, Excitable Chaos is animated by the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy between its three moving arms. 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 sense of more-than-oneness that spontaneously emerges 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
New Project: Astronomical Water
14.08.2025 - 28.08.2025 Village Numérique - MUTEK Montréal
Society for Arts and Technology [SAT], Montréal (CA/QC)
Omnipresent on our planet, water also exists in different states in the universe, notably in the form of drops in microgravity. Astronomical Water invites us to rediscover the sublime nature of water, questioning our relationship with this element, the magic it conceals and its life-giving power.
Echoing his performance 1 drop 1000 years, Martin Messier imagines an installation made up of a hundred drippers arranged on three large panels. The public is invited to move inside and outside the structure, sometimes watching the panorama, sometimes immersed in the heart of the device. Playing on the rhythms of the drops and the stroboscopic lights, the artist manipulates persistence of vision to reverse or freeze the movement of the water. The paintings follow one another: first emphasizing the gravitational effect, then giving the illusion of levitating water. Sound is reduced to its essentials: the sound of valves opening and closing. An organic rhythm that accompanies the falling drops and finally reveals their materiality.
Astronomical Water offers an immersion without a digital screen, where time seems to stretch, a contemplative and singular work that allows us to invest the world once the experience is over.
The Montréal-based artist Martin Messier (CA/QC) creates works blending sound art, light, robotics, and video. His performances and installations emphasize the body. Collaborating with various artists, his creations have been presented in 50 countries and have won numerous international awards. He has directed the company 14 lieux since 2010.
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
1 Drop 1000 Years at Curtocircuito - 22 Festival Internacional de Cinema e Artes Visuais
05.07.2025 Treatro Principal
Santiago de Compostela (ES)
1 DROP 1000 YEARS - Scientists agree that a drop of water travels the globe in less than 1,000 years. This drop shapes our world: it transports nutrients, heat and living organisms, while regulating our planet's climate and ecosystems. It contributes to the fundamental process of life's equilibrium.
Drawing on data from the Global Conveyor Belt, the vast ocean current that orchestrates the mixing of water from the five oceans and redistributes heat on a global scale, Martin Messier underlines the fundamental role of water as a vital substance. Yet, over the past two centuries, human action has been shaking this fragile balance: the gradual slowing of this ocean current could trigger a major climatic upheaval, threatening the entire chain of life.
In this hypnotic performance, the artist explores the tensions between the global currents that drive planetary equilibrium, and the intimate currents that resonate within each of us. Fifteen suspended devices, veritable kinetic sculptures, orchestrate the flow of water particles in real time, materializing oceanic dynamics. The patterns generated, fed by data such as the temperature and salinity of the Pacific Ocean, intertwine in a visual and sonic choreography. 1 drop 1000 years reveals itself as a masterful, poetic ballet, conveying the fragility of ecosystems and the delicate harmony that binds all things on Earth.
ANTENNAE 02025
01.07.2025 - 03.06.2025 Tromsø Arboret Forest
Tromsø (NO)
In this new installation the audience is invited to participate in a continuous work in progress, assembling and disassembling delicate geometric constructions that resemble molecular models or astronomical orbits.
The installation is currently adapted into a scenography for the audio walk Solaris? by Mathilde Caeyers. Here 3 dancers seem to construct various antenna-like constructions extracting memories from the vegetation and the audience.
The project will premiere on 1 July 2025 in a pine forest on Tromsø Island.
Premiere Tuesday 01.07.25 at 19:00
Wednesday 02.07.25 at 14:00 and 19:00
Thursday 03.07.25 at 14:00 and 19:00
With support of Norsk Kulturråd.
Read More
Topography of a second in ARKHÈ
28.06.2025 - 24.08.2025 Centre d'Art Contemporain du Luxembourg belge (CACLB)
Site de Montauban - Buzenol, Étalle (B)
Arkhè explores the origins and primal forces of creation. This Greek term, meaning both beginning and foundation, weaves a dialogue between materials, forms, and temporalities.
Laura Colmenares Guerra uses technology to reveal the invisible memory of ecosystems and forgotten voices.
The most recent, most human techniques can be put to use in the service of the most archaic aspects of nature—those least connected to the modern human, who increasingly retreats into the realm of their own technologies. Through their creative and interactive potential, these techniques are capable of bringing human consciousness closer to that of trees, air, rivers, and animals—elements that often escape our senses—and bridging the gap with Western human awareness and its blind spots. For this awareness sees itself as the sole master of the living world, which it views not as a subject to bond with, but as an object to be appropriated. Hence the unrestrained exploitation and destruction.
The artist thus uses photography and sound recording, compositing, and especially 3D imagery and printing. For five years, she dedicated herself to the Amazon and to the excesses that threaten and devastate it. Her deep dive into its topography and the life of one of its Indigenous peoples has been expressed through immersive works. Among other things, she captured sacred songs that call upon trees, rivers, animals, and ancestors, and made them visible by transmitting their sound waves to the ancient water of a 3D ceramic basin.
This work will serve as her inspiration this summer in Montauban. Thanks to the world of the latest human techniques, the stream that runs alongside the containers on the second floor might well be heard singing.
Originally from Colombia, Laura Colmenares Guerra studied in Bogotá, where she was born, before settling in Brussels. From there, she explores the rupture between the human body and spirit and those of nature.
Laura Colmenares Guerra
Centre d'Art Contemporain du Luxembourg belge (CACLB)
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
Navid Navab presents Organism: In Turbulence (Live) at FIBER
31.05.2025 FIBER Festival
Orgelpark, Amsterdam (NL)
Organism destabilises the socio-historical tonality of a century-old pipe organ to liberate and sound its turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic restraint. During concerts, shifting metastable states allow for Organism’s energetic thresholds to rapidly fall into and out of compatibility with one another. 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.
Performance: solo acoustic concert for robotically prepared historic organ, 2024
1 drop 1000 years at ISEA 2025 Seoul
29.05.2025 Jayu Theater at Seoul Arts Center
Seoul (KR)
1 Drop 1000 Years - In this hypnotic performance, I explore the tensions between the global currents that drive planetary equilibrium and the intimate currents that resonate within each of us. Fifteen suspended devices, veritable kinetic sculptures, orchestrate the flow of water particles in real time, materializing oceanic dynamics. The patterns generated, fed by data such as the temperature and salinity of the Pacific Ocean, intertwine in a visual and sonic choreography. 1 drop 1000 years unfolds as a poetic, immersive ballet, revealing the fragility of ecosystems and the delicate harmony that binds all things on Earth.
Scientists agree that a drop of water travels the globe in less than 1,000 years. This drop shapes our world: it transports nutrients, heat and living organisms, while regulating our planet's climate and ecosystems. It contributes to the fundamental process of life's equilibrium.
Drawing on data from the Global Conveyor Belt, the vast ocean current that orchestrates the mixing of water from the five oceans and redistributes heat on a global scale, Martin Messier underlines the fundamental role of water as a vital substance. Yet, over the past two centuries, human action has been shaking this fragile balance: the gradual slowing of this ocean current could trigger a major climatic upheaval, threatening the entire chain of life.
In this hypnotic performance, the artist explores the tensions between the global currents that drive planetary equilibrium, and the intimate currents that resonate within each of us. Fifteen suspended devices, veritable kinetic sculptures, orchestrate the flow of water particles in real time, materializing oceanic dynamics. The patterns generated, fed by data such as the temperature and salinity of the Pacific Ocean, intertwine in a visual and sonic choreography. 1 drop 1000 years reveals itself as a masterful, poetic ballet, conveying the fragility of ecosystems and the delicate harmony that binds all things on Earth.