First on the program in Mois Multi 2024, at Quebec City’s Nef Saint-Roch, then in the International Digital Art Biennale (BIAN) at Montreal’s Arsenal, one could see and hear Iranian-Canadian artist Navid Navab’s Organism + Excitable Chaos (2018-2024). This “investigative artscience platform” that the artist has patiently developed over the past six years is presented as both an installation and a concert. Organism is based on an electromechanical and computerized apparatus that enables the artist to hijack and redesign a Casavant organ to draw out truly unheard-of sonorities and meanings. In the installation mode, Excitable Chaos, a pendulum composed of three connected arms is placed in front of the organ, and its incessantly renewed movements play out a mechanical ballet, in which the rhythmic relations to the music quickly become apparent.

The organ holds a special place in the Western musical tradition: on top of being a parametric instrument (thanks to its switches, which enable live configuration of the instrument’s timbre), it is the only classical instrument that decouples the performers’ gestural energy from the sound generation mechanism. Navab takes this decoupling to the extreme with Organism, by introducing numerous layers of agentivity between the performer’s gesture and the acoustic pipe: various generative algorithms, electromechanical devices or gestural interfaces are inserted into the instrumental chain. By making this parametric character of the organ proliferate, the artist

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