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.

Organism has been awarded the Golden Nica 2025 in the Digital Musics & Sound Art.

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.