Organism + Excitable Chaos by Navid Navab in collaboration with Garnet Willis, are part of Proximity Music: Echoes of Entropy, a joint exhibition program initiated by iii and Rewire.

The chaotic motion of Excitable Chaos, a robotically-steered triple pendulum, drives the aerodynamic thresholds of Organism, a robotically prepared century-old pipe organ. Organism dismantles the conventional clean tones of the organ to sonify its turbulent materiality. Through the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy between its three moving arms, Excitable Chaos conducts Organism to create sound. This highlights how, in nature, even minor changes are key contributors to the pendulum’s unpredictable behaviour. This work reflects on how a sense of more-than-oneness may spontaneously develop in life and nature, and shows how a wild yet steerable relationality can help people to co-express unknown worlds.

More detailed project information, photos and videos HERE!

Navid Navab is an antidisciplinary composer 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. These investigative works orchestrate sensory attunement to forms of life, at the pre-metabolic border between breathing and not breathing, while cybernetically enfolding these excitable dynamics. 

Garnet Willis is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist, audio engineer, and instrument builder. Willis’s research investigates the crossroads between sensation, form over time, sentient matter, and material agency. 

Navid Navab: Concept, composition, sculpture, programming, design, electronics, sonification 
Garnet Willis: Engineering, design, sculpture, electronics
Research partners: SAT Montréal with Québec Ministry of Innovation, Topological Media Lab with Fonds de Recherche du Québec, X-IO Technologies UK 
Assistance: Camille Desjardins, Charles Bicari, Jean-Michaël Celerier, Philippe Vandal, Eric L’Ecuyer 
Production: Transductive Formations 
Residency: Werktank, Recto-Verso, Hexagram, Milieux, iii
Support: Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Conseil des arts de Montréal