Sewing Machine Orchestra

Singer sewing machines, objects charged with collective memory and family histories, evoke a transfigured past brought back to the present and decontextualized. In Sewing Machine Orchestra, twelve domestic machines, collected and diverted from their utilitarian function, become the protagonists of a choreography orchestrated by computer and amplified by contact microphones.

Directly inspired by the performance with the same name, this installation reveals the sound and light potential of this familiar object. Unsettling in the agitation it generates, the work evolves in a crescendo of sound: like a polycephalic mechanical monster, the machines come to life with increasing intensity, filling the space with a low tone.

The omnipresent light accentuates the spectral effect of the installation. It transcends the overall choreography and casts the shadows of these ghostly objects, symbolically reanimating an industrial and domestic past. This hybrid work invites us to take part in an unsettling experiment on our links to collective memory and its materiality.

Martin Messier
Sewing Machine Orchestra
Baltoscandal 2026

A robotically prepared historic pipe organ driven by a robotically-steered chaotic pendulum

Organism + Excitable Chaos begins with an act of dismantling: taking a century-old organ and making it sound from a state of imbalance. The piece brings together Organism —a 1910 Casavant organ prepared robotically— and Excitable Chaos, a robotically guided triple pendulum that activates its aerodynamic thresholds. The result is a kinetic and sonic installation that displaces the instrument from its historical stability and releases a turbulent materiality made up of minimal variations, unstable timbres and unpredictable responses.

There is no closed composition here simply being performed, but rather a living system of movement, air and vibration that constantly reorganises itself. With each oscillation, Excitable Chaos drives the sonic behaviour of the organ, bringing kinetic chaos and acoustic turbulence into dialogue. The piece thus proposes an attentive listening to what deviates, trembles and emerges, opening up a space where sound is not fully controlled, but instead allowed to appear.

Eufònic - Festival around the sound, visual and digital-performative arts that is held in Terres de l’Ebre.

Navid Navab
Organism + Excitable Chaos
Eufònic

MUTEK Forum 2026
12th Edition — Symbiotic Frequencies

From 26 to 28 August 2026, MUTEK Forum returns to Montréal for three days of talks, performances, workshops, screenings, masterclasses, and professional gatherings dedicated to the future of digital creation.

Storytelling: Expanding Realities
Day 1 of MUTEK Forum is dedicated to immersive storytelling, Indigenous media practices, expanded narratives, and the relationships between embodiment, technology, and communities.
Featuring Loretta Sarah Todd, Navid Navab, Zach Blas, Caroline Monnet, New Models, Lou Fauroux, and Tracy Rector.

Navid Navab is a media alchemist, antidisciplinary composer, and tabletop cosmologist whose practice draws from contemporary music, biomedical sonification, and philosophical biology. Their recent performance-installation Organism earned the 2025 Golden Nica from Ars Electronica — the highest international honor in digital musics and sound arts — as well as the prestigious Lumen Prize.

Through an investigative ArtScience practice, Navab creates art-machines that infuse matter with a sense of liveness, probing its excitable dynamics and making the imperceptible palpable at the pre-metabolic border between breathing and not breathing. As a gestural-sound composer and machine-improviser, Navab centers the poly-temporal and material dimensions of the sonic event, performing alongside artists such as George Lewis, Lori Freedman, and Sandeep Bhagwati.

Their works consist of kinetic sound sculptures, theatrical interactive installations, and site-specific interventions that circulate internationally at venues including Ars Electronica, MaerzMusik Berlin, the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, and Japan Society NY. As a researcher active since 2008, Navab also directs the Topological Media Lab (TML) in Montréal, fusing phenomenological studies with artistic research-creation practices.

Navid Navab
MUTEK Montréal
MUTEK Forum

Organism + Excitable Chaos

“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

Aarhus Festival was founded in 1965 and one of Northern Europe's oldest cultural festivals. Up to one million visitors over a 10-day period and more than 1,000 unique events.

Navid Navab
Organism + Excitable Chaos
Aarhus Festival

With 4,329 submissions from 106 countries, the Prix Ars Electronica 2026 once again affirms its role as a central hub in the global network of media art. The four categories received 1,144 submissions in New Animation Art, 1,757 in Interactive Art+, 754 in Digital Humanity, and 674 in u19–create your world. 

In the category Prix Ars Electronica 2026 Digital Humanity,
Laura Colmenares Guerra is honoured with an Award of Distinction for her project R€¥€R$€.
Congratulations!

"With R€¥€R$€, Laura Colmenares Guerra has created an aesthetically compelling immersive work that introduces viewers to the complexity of one of the world’s most fascinating yet endangered ecosystems: the Amazon region. Through virtual reality and interactive cartographies, the project exposes the entanglement of ecological fragility with political and economic forces, pointing out the devastating impact of extractivism and deforestation.

R€¥€R$€ highlights the fatal connection between colonialism and capitalism, which is a central theme of the artwork. By using symbols such as gold, raw materials, or algorithmic processes, the artist draws attention to the historical exploitation of the Amazon region. It immediately becomes clear that this exploitation continues to follow the logic of resource extraction. Virtual reality makes this critique particularly effective by making the power structures palpable.

The fact that the challenges facing the Amazon region do not stop at political borders was subtly conveyed through a curatorial decision regarding the division of the areas to be explored: rather than following the logic of national borders, the exhibition is divided into twenty-one sections, corresponding to the headwaters of the Amazon’s major tributaries—across nine countries and more than 847 million hectares." - Jury Statement

Laura Colmenares Guerra (CO/BE) is a Colombian artist based in Brussels. Her practice encompasses installation, sculpture, and digital 3D narratives, including animation, XR, and ceramics 3D printing. Working from a research-based approach, she explores the relationships between contemporary Western societies and living ecosystems, questioning constructions of nature, territory, and technology as mediations of reality. Her work often transforms environmental data and topographic information into immersive, sensor-based experiences that connect audiences to distant ecological realities. Recent projects address themes of environmental fragility, interspecies transformation, and the entanglement between extractivist systems and vulnerable territories.

R€¥€R$€ is the third chapter of the Ríos Trilogy (2018–2024), exploring the Amazon Basin through language, cartography, and the construction of territory. The Ríos Trilogy does not pretend to speak for Amazonia or its peoples. It examines how colonial systems of representation construct particular narratives about a territory that belongs, first and foremost, to itself, and how human, cultural and environmental dimensions continue to collide with economic and political forces under acute climate stress. 

Laura Colmenares Guerra
R€¥€R$€
Ríos Trilogy
Prix Ars Electronica 2026 Digital Humanity