Organism
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) A 1910 Casavant pipe-organ is rescued from the impending gentrification at a heritage site in Montreal. Organism destabilizes the socio-historical tonality of the organ 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. Organism + Excitable Chaos (installation) The chaotic motion of Excitable Chaos, a robotically-steered triple pendulum, drives the aerodynamic thresholds of Organism, a 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.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) A 1910 Casavant pipe-organ is rescued from the impending gentrification at a heritage site in Montreal. Organism destabilizes the socio-historical tonality of the organ 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.
Organism + Excitable Chaos (installation) The chaotic motion of Excitable Chaos, a robotically-steered triple pendulum, drives the aerodynamic thresholds of Organism, a 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.
