The installation is accessible in Klarisky Church (free entrance). Exhibition opening: 25th November at 17:00.

 

Navid Navab (IR/CA), winner of the 2025 Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica and the Lumen Prize, is an art-scientist and composer whose practice dissolves the boundary between scientific inquiry and sensory attunement. Navab’s art-machines draw a sense of liveliness from matter suspended in metastable states, where thermodynamic reservoirs of indeterminacy generate cybernetic intentionality.

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 formations. Organism destabilizes the socio-historical tonality of the organ to liberate its hidden turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic repression. 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 mass modulations enact unique chaotic movement systems, each a stochastic universe unto itself, while highlighting how, in nature, even the subtlest variations are key contributors to cohesive behaviors, whose next states are unknowable.

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 cascading sense of more-than-oneness that spontaneously develop in life and nature and how this wild yet steerable relationality can help us express worlds yet unknown.

Navid Navab and Garnet Willis have been awarded the Golden Nica in the Digital Musics & Sound Art category at Ars Electronica 2026.

 

Concept & artistic direction, composition, programming & sonification: Navid Navab
Sculpture, design, electronics: Navid Navab with Garnet Willis
Engineering: Garnet Willis
Production: Transductive Formations (navidnavab.com/company)
Consultants: Camille Desjardins (electronics fabrication), SAT Montreal +  Charles Bicari (pendulum firmware)