Installation
Navid Navab / Garnet Willis

Organism+Excitable Chaos by Navid Navab. © Miha Godec
Thurs & Fri (20., 26./ 27.3.): 15:00 – 20:00
Sat & Sun (21./22., 28./ 29.3.): 12:00 –20:00
Free admission
“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 Montréal, 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. The pipes chosen for the work exhibit the highest degree of instability, ‘edge-tone jumping’ to sound intermittently even the subtlest fluctuations, bringing the energetic interdependencies of the system to the sensory realm.
Designed to produce unpredictable compositional futures, Excitable Chaos is a nonlinear movement system 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 mass-orbital modulations allow Excitable Chaos to continuously enact chaotic movement systems, each a stochastic universe unto itself, 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.
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 channelling 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 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.” – Navid Navab
Navid Navab – Concept, direction, composition, sculpture, programming, design, electronics, sonification
Garnet Willis – Engineering, sculpture, lead design, electronics, production
Transductive Formations – Production
Consultants and Technical Assistance
Camille Desjardins - electronics fabrication
Charles Bicari - pendulum robotics firmware
Jean-Michaël Celerier - ossia.lib, C++
Evan Montpellier - ossia.lib, Max/MSP
Philippe Vandal - technical assistance
Asa Perlman - stator firmware prototype
Nicholas Everette - stator ring and coil fabrication
Eric L’Ecuyer - aluminum and metal, welding
Research partners: SAT Montréal × Québec Ministry of Innovation (pendulum microcontroller IoT), Topological Media Lab × Fonds de recherche du Québec, X-IO Technologies (pendulum IMU sensor fusion)
Residencies: Werktank, FIBER, iii, iMAL, Recto-Verso, Hexagram, Milieux, Ateliers Belleville
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