Organism: In Turbulence
Navid Navab
Informed by my experience as a queer Iranian-Canadian artist, I steer away from idealized forms of digital expression driven by military-cybernetic agendas aimed at controlling nature. For me, queering generative algorithms means re-centering their expressive dynamics in bodily relation, in movement, and in time—at the very core of nature’s uncontrollable creativity.
This work traces the non-idealized, pre-mathematical, and kinetic source of today's generative algorithms (ie. vector synthesis, stochastic music, AI music). I use digital media to collaborate with excitable tendencies of matters-of-process, suspended in metastable-states, where thermodynamic-reservoirs-of-indeterminacy generate cybernetic-intentionality. “Organism: In Turbulence” (performance) destabilizes the socio-historical tonality of a 1910 Casavant pipe-organ, rescued from the impending gentrification at a heritage site in Montreal, to liberate and sound its turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing long-silenced timbres after centuries of sonic repression.
During concerts, shifting metastable states allow for energetic thresholds to fall into and out of compatibility with one another. Navab shapes this ecology of interdependent timbres into emergent realms, traversing microsonic-polyrhythms, post-rock overspill and swampy-soundscapes. In the installation version, Organism + Excitable Chaos (created in collaboration with Garnet Willis), the chaotic motion of Excitable Chaos, a robotically-steered triple pendulum, drives the aerodynamic thresholds of Organism, the robotically-prepared century-old pipe organ.
The generative movement of Excitable Chaos conducts Organism’s aerodynamic thresholds, and in this way draws kinetic-chaos into conversation with sonic-turbulence. 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 in co-expressing worlds yet unknown.
Project Collaborators:
Navid Navab: concept, direction, composition, sculpture, programming, design, electronics, sonification, performance Garnet Willis: sculpture, engineering, design, electronics Production: Transductive Formations (https://www.navidnavab.com/company) Research Partners: SAT Montréal with Québec ministry of Innovation, Topological Media Lab with Fonds de Recherche du Québec Assistance: Camille Desjardins, Charles Bicari, Jean-Michaël Celerier, Philippe Vandal, Evan Montpellier Residencies: Werktank, FIBER , iii, Recto-Verso, iMAL, Hexagram, Milieux Institute, Matralab Support: Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Conseil des arts de Montréal
