As a part of iMAL's 25th anniversary exhibition I am vertical (but I would rather be horizontal), Navid Navab and Garnet Willis propose the chaotic motion of Excitable Chaos, a robotically-steered triple pendulum, which 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 patterning. Organism destabilizes the socio-historical tonality of the organ to liberate and sound its hidden turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic restraint. 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 modulations allow the artist to enact unique chaotic movement systems, each a stochastic universe unto itself, while highlighting how even the subtlest variations are key contributors to cohesive behavior, whose next state is rendered unknown.

The generative movement of Excitable Chaos conducts Organism’s aerodynamic thresholds, drawing kinetic chaos into dialogue with sonic turbulence. The resulting turbulent 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 co-express worlds yet unknown.

Navid Navab is recognized as a media alchemist and antidisciplinary composer with a background in contemporary music, biomedical sonification, and philosophical biology. Through an investigative ArtScience practice, Navab's recent creations meticulously stage uncanny forms of order, imbuing machines with a sense of liveliness through fusion with the excitable dynamics of matter. Navab’s art machines sculpturally engage with transductive structures of liveliness, probing the excitable tendencies of matters-of-process far from equilibrium—suspended in metastable states where thermodynamic reservoirs of indeterminacy generate cybernetic intentionality. Making the imperceptible palpable, these investigative works orchestrate sensory attunement to forms of life, at the pre-metabolic border between breathing and not breathing, while cybernetically enfolding their excitable dynamics.