| A robotically prepared historic pipe organ driven by a robotically-steered chaotic pendulum “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 Navid Navab (IR/CA) is an art-scientist and composer with a background in contemporary music, biomedical sonification, and philosophical biology, whose practice dissolves the boundary between scientific inquiry and sensory attunement. In 2025, their performance-installation Organism won the Golden Nica in Digital Musics & Sound Art at Prix Ars Electronica and the Lumen Prize. Navab's creations stage uncanny forms of order by imbuing machines with a sense of liveliness through fusion with the excitable dynamics of matter. These art-machines probe matter suspended in metastable states, where thermodynamic reservoirs of indeterminacy generate cybernetic intentionality. Making the imperceptible palpable, the works attune their publics to forms of life at the pre metabolic border between breathing and not breathing. Navab's exhibitions, concerts, and interventions circulate internationally at festivals and venues including MaerzMusik Berlin, Kapelica Gallery Ljubljana, 798CUBE Beijing, Biennale Némo Paris, Rewire The Hague, Sonica Glasgow, device_art Zagreb, and ELEKTRA Montréal. Garnet Willis (CA) is an interdisciplinary artist, audio-engineer and instrument builder. He combines his disparate skills as designer, wood and metal-worker, sound engineer and electronics geek to produce multivariate artworks that tend to revolve around sound. His interests sit at the crossroads between sensation, form over time, sentient matter, and material agency. He enjoys team collaborations - especially when he gets to design and build new types of lively and challenging objects. Navid Navab
Organism + Excitable Chaos
KIKK Festival | 
