Make visible the invisible movement of life.

1 drop 1000 years is an immersive performance by Martin Messier inspired by the major ocean currents that regulate the planet’s climate. Based on real scientific data, fifteen kinetic sculptures transform the movements of water into an all-encompassing visual and sound experience. Between art, science and technology, the work highlights the essential role of water in the balance of life and the fragility of this ecosystem in the face of climate change. A captivating sensory experience that invites us to rethink our connection with the planet.

Martin Messier
1 drop 1000 years
Alliance Française Vancouver

Scientists agree that a drop of water travels the globe in less than 1,000 years. This drop shapes our world: it transports nutrients, heat and living organisms, while regulating our planet's climate and ecosystems. It contributes to the fundamental process of life's equilibrium.

Drawing on data from the Global Conveyor Belt, the vast ocean current that orchestrates the mixing of water from the five oceans and redistributes heat on a global scale, Martin Messier underlines the fundamental role of water as a vital substance. Yet, over the past two centuries, human action has been shaking this fragile balance: the gradual slowing of this ocean current could trigger a major climatic upheaval, threatening the entire chain of life.

In this hypnotic performance, the artist explores the tensions between the global currents that drive planetary equilibrium, and the intimate currents that resonate within each of us. Fifteen suspended devices, veritable kinetic sculptures, orchestrate the flow of water particles in real time, materializing oceanic dynamics. The patterns generated, fed by data such as the temperature and salinity of the Pacific Ocean, intertwine in a visual and sonic choreography. 1 drop 1000 years reveals itself as a masterful, poetic ballet, conveying the fragility of ecosystems and the delicate harmony that binds all things on Earth.

Martin Messier
1 drop 1000 years
NeuzTec!

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 of 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
Himmel under Berlin - Tickets

Founded 2000 in Bratislava, the NEXT Festival is an annual celebration of exploratory music and sonic art: from electronic experiments and free­form improvisation to audio­visual projects, it brings together artists who push the boundaries.

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.

Navid Navab w/ Garnet Willis - Organism + Excitable Chaos (installation)
25 - 28 November 2026

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 - Organism: In Turbulence (concert)
28 November 2026 - 16:00

In this solo acoustic performance, Navid Navab improvises with Organism, an experimental instrument which dismantles the socio-historical tonality of a century-old pipe organ, in order to liberate its turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic repression. Navab surfs upon subtle material conditions through which aerodynamic energetics fall into and out of compatibility with one another to steer Organism’s unstable timbres toward sonic self-organization, traversing microsonic polyrhythms, post-rock overspill and swampy soundscapes.

Navid Navab
Organism + Excitable Chaos
Organism: In Turbulence
NEXT Festival

Urgent times. Emergent futures.

EMERGENCE[Y] brings together artists, scientists, technologists, and collaborators to explore how we adapt to a world in flux. In an age marked by ecological collapse, technological acceleration, and social upheaval, adaptation becomes not only a biological imperative but a creative and ethical act. This Science Gallery Melbourne exhibition asks: how might we not only survive through change but emerge in a critically reimaged future?  

tele-present wind, created by artist David Bowen in collaboration with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory that uses data collected from the wind sensor on the Perseverance Mars rover.

The exhibition has been curated by Science Gallery Head Curator Tilly Boleyn, with input from a team of academic experts and young people.

David Bowen
Science Gallery Melbourne