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.
As a phono-menologist and gestureBender Navab is interested in the poetics of schizophonia, gesture, materiality, and embodiment: their earlier works (2010-2016) investigated the transmutation of matter and the enrichment of its inherent performative qualities, using gestures, rhythms and vibration from everyday life as basis for realtime compositions, resulting in augmented acoustical poetry and painterly light that enchants improvisational, and pedestrian movements.
As a gestural-sound composer and machine-improviser, Navab centers the poly-temporal, inter-agential, inter-cultural, in-situ, and material dimensions of the sonic event, and, where possible, completely steers away from fixed media and digital grids. Navab often composes and performs with similarly minded composer-performers such as George Lewis, Lori Freedman, Rainer Weins, Jean Derome, Sandeep Bhagwati, Bozzini Quartet, Maya Kuroki, Amelia Cuni, No Hay Banda Ens., Mei Han, Amelia Cuni, Lan Tung, Wu Wei, Mike Svoboda, and Nikita Carter.
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.
As a researcher, Navab has been leading interdisciplinary experiments since 2010, conceiving uncanny assemblages at the edge of science, synthesizing research at IRCAM Paris [Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique], LASG Toronto [Living Architecture Systems Group], CRIMMT Montreal [Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire en musique médias et technologie], CNMAT Berkeley [Center for New Music and Audio Technologies], CAMP [Computer Aided Medical Procedures & Augmented Reality group at Technical University of Munich], Milieux institute / Hexagram Network Montreal, and CIID [Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design].
Navab also directs the Topological Media Lab (TML), leveraging phenomenological studies, fused with a multitude of disciplines and practices, to inform the creation of computationally-augmented performance environments. TML projects serve as investigations in the construction of fresh modes of cultural knowledge and the critical studies of media arts and techno-science, bringing together practices of speculative inquiry, scientific investigation and artistic research-creation practices.
Navab expresses the ontogenic moment that vividly moves around the cosmos. [Their creations] look like a paranormal phenomenon, like the dance of life itself.
advertimes, K. and T. Koguchi, Japan, 2018
“Confusion” is important [aspect of navab’s work] because it reminds us that we don’t know what we think we know… the senses become aware of their own partiality and this, in itself, is a kind of bio political act… somewhere between contingency and control… opening up the boundaries of where things stop and start, through the poles of imagination.
H. Bergen, Dance Currents Magazine, 2017
Underlying this array imaginative creations is a playful awareness of the relationship between gesture, materiality, and sound… Navid reacquaints us with the magic and wonder of our embodied experience.
R. Elliott, international institute for critical studies in improvisation, 2014
With an incredible capacity to understand that some of the most beautiful things in life are also the most simple, Navab fully embraces what others overlook.”
K. Jurjans, cujah art journal, 2010
…the more you engage with the exhibit, the more difficult it becomes to categorize it as an art form. As far as shattering the art/life dichotomy goes, navab’s responsive environments are the stuff of groundbreaking achievements.
C. Prémont, Lien Multimedia, 2012
Navab plunges us into the experience of sonic and material processes in which the boundaries of mechanical movements, generative algorithms and acoustic materials become blurred and intertwined, to the delight of our ears, eyes and imagination.
P Baltazar, Espace Art Actuel, 2024
Navid Navab has a surprising relationship with the arts. The creator first investigated the scientific side of creation thanks to extensive training in sonification, which enables data to be collected and transformed into embodied sound environments. Navab’s approach, marked by multi-sensory experimentation, is rooted in the search for experiences that interweave technological, natural and human elements. At the very heart of his work: chaos.
F. Brousseau, Lien Multimedia, 2024
…technically impressive, with elaborate interactive audiovisual effects. […] brilliantly controlled, the solo, was overpolished, slick.
A. Mac, The New York Times, 2017
Navab’s mysterious rope-and-pully-activated electronics provided extremely convincing wingbeats […] The music was incredibly textured and precise.
Exclaim! Magazine, 2019
STATEMENTS
On transductive resonance
In my investigative ArtScience practice, I synthesize agential hybrids and new forms of co-expression: events of mattering, imbuing machinic dynamics with a sense of liveliness. As a composer, I orchestrate forms of metastability and I inform transductive operations of taking-form.
By transduction, I mean a physical operation via which an energetic activity propagates from one element to the next, reciprocally, within specific energetic domains which themselves are founded as a result of this structuring propagation. Drawing from Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy, this unfolding exchange doesn’t just transfer energy—it carves out the very domains through which it flows, creating temporal self-amplifying structures in the act of propagation. This analogical activity, of transduction, organizes matters of process from place to place, setting up energetic tensions between disparities which now become resolved contemporaneously with the emergence of new realities that belong to this new order of organization. This meandering crystalization is nature’s engine of intentionality and invention. It is natural sense in the making: transductive information in tensile formation.
Similarly, at Transductive Formations, my studio-atelier, we bring previously incompatible material, computational, and cultural realities into transductive resonance with one another, and put them into reciprocal communication within higher organizational dimensions capable of resolving their incompatibilities and tensions. At our studio, transduction is embraced as a methodology for the thermodynamical propagation of cybernetic liveliness. It also serves as a liveliness-preserving ethos for collaboration with nature’s form-taking engines, from chaotic patterning to the movement of life.
N. Navab 2025
On excitable matter & computation beyond the military-cybernetic complex
From interactive scenographies to participatory installations, my work gives voice to the generative forces of nature. Informed by my experience as a queer Iranian-Canadian artist, I both engage with and challenge disciplinary boundaries, steering away from idealized forms of digital expression driven by military-cybernetic agendas aimed at controlling nature. For me, queering generative algorithms means re-centering their expressive dynamics in bodily relation, in movement, and in time—at the very core of nature’s uncontrollable creativity.
I trace the non-idealized, pre-mathematical, and kinetic sources of what today falls under labels such as generative algorithms, vector synthesis, stochastic music, and AI music. I use digital and non-digital media to collaborate with the *excitable tendencies of matter far from equilibrium. These lively sites are potent theatres of stochastic formations. Therefore, at every step, I make sure not to replace these lively and excitable forces with digital models and mathematical idealizations. Instead, I use digital and non-digital media to attune-to, co-steer, move-with, and surf upon the natural dynamics of formation.
*Excitability can be understood as "the degree of liveliness of matter [...} in its capacity to affect and be affected by other bodies.” (Natasha Myers)
N. Navab 2023
On composing with computational matter
I maintain the view that computation is foremost a material process, thereby non-linear, vibrant, and irreducible to deterministic models. Coming from this stance, my artistic process aims to preserve the richness of material-computational processes while leveraging them compositionally.
The act of composing computational media could entail the orchestration of event dynamics to quasi-deterministically enact degrees of instability and to enchant the stuff-of-the-medium. This process starts with an ethico-aesthetical search for the excitable mysteries of matter (material-energy-affective processes), and leads to a careful orchestration of sensuous moments of knowing with others, humans or none.
N. Navab 2019
On alchemy, interdisciplinarity, and time
Can we reverse the still prominent European Modernism’s separations— between the conceptual and the material, the precise and the messy, the sciences and the arts—and go back to the holistic richness of alchemical matter? This transition that we are currently experiencing calls for a shift away from representational technologies: from interfaces to stuff, from objects to fields of matter-in-process, from fixed concepts to processes that enact concepts.
As Duchamp puts it, “alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.” For me, in the process of thinking-feeling through poetry-infused-matter, essentially what is understood and then given up is attachments to far-too-human notions of tempo, agency, and time. Instead, I attempt to embrace and work within the infinitely rich and pluri-textural tempi of matter, my own tissues included.