Prix Ars Electronica - The Golden Nica for Digital Musics & Sound Art 2025 for Organism + Excitable Chaos by Navid Navab (IR/CA) and Garnet Willis (CA)
Organism is an investigative platform that helps us perceive and understand how chaotic motion and turbulent dynamics can shape sound. It takes two forms: as a solo concert and as an installation. In both versions, a robotically prepared historic pipe organ forms the centerpiece. Systems once used to eliminate turbulent airflow were removed, unleashing long-repressed timbres after centuries of silence.
The most unstable pipes were chosen for their sensitivity to even the slightest fluctuations in airflow, bringing the energetic interdependencies into the sensory realm. In this system, even tiny movements of a servo motor controlling airflow in a pipe can cause sudden changes in sound. During concerts under the title Organism: In Turbulence, Navid Navab uses gestural controllers to interact with Organism’s wild temporality.
In the installation Organism + Excitable Chaos, created by Navid Navab in collaboration with Garnet Willis, a robotically-steered triple pendulum drives the airflow dynamics of the organ. Animated by the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy between its three moving arms, it continuously generates chaotic motion.Its dance with gravity is wirelessly sensed and translated into data, allowing Excitable Chaos to shape Organism’s sonic behavior–bringing kinetic chaos into dialogue with sonic turbulence.
Navid Navab
Navid Navab (IR/CA) (t{s/he}y) is recognized as a media alchemist, antidisciplinary composer, and tabletop cosmologist, with a background in contemporary music, biomedical sonification, and philosophical biology. Through an investigative ArtScience practice, Navab's recent creations (2016-2025) 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.
Navab’s art works, which take on the form of gestural sound compositions, responsive architecture, site specific interventions, theatrical interactive installations, kinetic sound sculptures, and multimodal comprovisational performances, circulates internationally at diverse venues such as Ars Electronica, Kapelica Gallery Slovenia, device_art triennial Zagreb, NEMO Bienniale Paris, Sonica Glasgow, 798CUBE Beijing, rewire The Hague, KIKK Namur, ELEKTRA Montreal, ISEA (Montreal, Spain), Eufònic Barcelona, Canadian Center for Architecture, Kiblix Slovenia, Japan Society NY, Fiber Amsterdam, Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville, Western Front Vancouver, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Shanghai eArts, MUMUTH Austria, HKW Berlin, McCord Museum, Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Musiikin Aika Finland, Festival International Montréal/Nouvelles Musiques, milanOltre Festival, Timisoara Romania, CURRENTS New Media Santa Fe, Electric Eclectics Meaford, Pop Montreal, TANGENTE, among others.
Garnet Willis
Garnet Willis is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist, audio engineer, composer 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. Garnet is focussed on his investigations at the crossroads between sensation, form over time, and material agency. He draws upon ideas borrowed from stochastic music composition in his quest to develop shapeshifting sculptures that utilize generative chaotic complex material calculations driven by internal stresses resulting in unpredictable, real time changes in physical form.
He has garnered prestigious international awards for his artworks, compositions and recordings, including the Bourges Prize, and has had his work exhibited and performed in the USA, UK, Austria France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Colombia. He has written/built many commissioned works including his “'flux” series of self-playing electromagnetic sound sculptures.
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