DESCRIPTION

A culinary concert orchestrated around a chef, an enchanted kitchenette, and sonified ingredients. Practices of Everyday Life | Cooking is a Comprovisational environment that focuses foremost on post-schizophonic poetics of gesture-sound correlations.

_

The cook wields foods, pans and spices, transmuted gesturally into spatialized sound and painterly light.

A knife rasps against another,
onions vocalize their unfolding mutation into a cacophonous a cappella,
sizzling oil slides into a downpour of Bartok-pizzicati,
while seductive aromas immerse the viewer in a multi-sensory augmentation of everyday practices.
_

Within the enchanted kitchenette, gestures mimicking sonic affordances and audiovisual events shaped under gestural contours feedback one into the other, breaking dualities such as analog-digital, material-computational, performer-performed, instrument-score, or intention-noise.

As the chef prepares a meal, sections emerge from culinary tasks to form multisensory tableaus and synaesthetic textures. Each tableau is a unique gestural sound composition undertaking phenomenological reconsideration of the musical event at whole. 

Instruments of interaction—sensors, cutting edge acoustic sensing techniques, sonification modules, responsive video, etc—carefully embedded into the scenography, symbolically charge everyday actions and objects in ways that combine the composer’s design with the performer’s contingent nuance. The act of performing music then emerges freely from open engagement with matter, borrowing elements from “play”, day to day living, and the movement arts.

Throughout the concert a multitude of av performance paradigms are evoked and reinvented through Navab’s responsive mise-en-musique, allowing the composer to retain an aesthetic nostalgia for and yet mash many realms such as ritualized sound art, videomusic, music actuelle, dronescape, glitch, microsound, music concrete, vaporwave, techno, and plunderphonics. 

Statement no.1: Bio-political context

“Cooking” is the first part in a series of projects [Practices of Everyday Life] exploring how everyday gestures can become computationally charged with symbolic intensity and used for improvised play. Practices of Everyday Life performance/intervention series (cooking, mixology, barber, surgery, etc.) reflect Navab’s continued interest in the enactment of dynamic performative ecologies that allow for poetic and virtuosic improvisation with computationally enriched matter. Making the imperceptible palpable, these works shift everyday perception, foregrounding and backgrounding radically different registers of experience that co-articulate our actions and yet slip our attention.

At a time when economic markets of desire, profit, and capitalizable efficiencies aggressively shape everyday actions, it is most relevant to suggest new gestural and affective trajectories into our everyday routines. We need to deconstruct the fixedness of routine tasks and manufactured forms of desire in order to manipulate and thus again enjoy the structures we live within. By disconnecting gestures from their anticipated meanings I orchestrate purposeful misunderstandings, allowing the audience to extract new meaning and affect from the otherwise familiar culinary tasks. 

Statement no.2: Performing materiality / Materials performing

In Practices of Everyday Life | Cooking, my approach to instrument conception is based on a careful consideration of the coupling of tactile and sonic gestural action across the layers of physical and computational material in coordinated dynamical variation. 

”Material Computation” refers to the non-digital processes of computation that happen in physical materials that do not follow the logic of a finite state machine. Computational Matter are materials that exhibit inherent computational properties. When designing new instruments with everyday objects I have found it productive to move away from the purely mimetic conception of digital performance systems and classic paradigms such as that of composer, score, instrument and interpreter. My approach not only considers the materiality of the instrument, but leverages it as a computational substrate. Matter does not distinguish between performer intentions and material physics; the same holds for computational matter. I employ this inherent symmetry to design for arbitrary associations of agents doing arbitrary actions. This allows me to deterministically orchestrate the musical event at large while allowing for the inherent indeterminacy of such accidental events as a piece of carrot rolling on the table to contribute profoundly to the composition. Under these circumstances gestural meaning, intentionality, expressivity, and musicality freely arise from the context established in the moment of performance together with the apparatus of expectation.

In the case of instruments based on contact or manual engagement with augmented physical objects, the textural and resonant nature of the physical material becomes a central component for consideration, along with the kinaesthetic gestural interactions that are conditioned through the spatial and material structure of the object. For example, a vibration isolated wooden surface with an evenly distributed textural roughness, enough acoustic conductivity, and a balanced impulse response is ideal for transcoding a wide range of gestural manipulations carried out via human skin, nails, and light objects. Such an instrument will transmute gestural interactions across a wider timbral spectrum, and thus provides an optimal platform for the continuous differentiation and distinct amplification of subtle changes in the process of haptic-sound feature extraction. This enables the participants to rely solely on their felt engagement with real matter and in the process discover and invent their own repertoire of meaningful gestures and nuance with physical consistency between action and sound.

PRESS

Underlying his array of imaginative creations is a playful awareness of the relationship between gesture, materiality, and sound. By enchanting the inherent properties of materials we know from everyday life with potential for play, Navab reacquaints us with the magic and wonder of our embodied experience.

Rachel Elliott, International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, 2016

It is a sort of a rite; the practice of cooking becomes something mystical, that goes beyond its purpose. Digital and organic, artificial and natural get merged together to deliver an experience that plays with the senses in a way we don’t normally have access to. It’s like we are “listening to the food”, and for the first time we see something so common and mundane under a completely different, renewed perspective.

Translated from Italian, Neoma. Ars Electronica, 2016 review

It was as if the frying pan itself was vigorously acting on a future stage where digital and physical intersect. Who would have thought that the sound of the rising heat and oil in the pan would be roaring like that all over the venue? The sounds were so clear, beautiful and exciting. It was the best performance of the night.

Translated from Japanese, Naho Iguchi, Ars Electronica opening concert review, Bound Baw Magazine, 2016

Navab’s synaesthetic, multisensory concert, which explores the musicalization and transmutative potential of the routine act of cooking transforms, among other culinary fare and objects, an eggplant, a mortar and pestle, and sizzling hot oil into musical instruments, lending an otherworldly dimension to the otherwise prosaic act of preparing food.

Katia Jean Paul, Art/Culture Blog, 2015

In the late evening, Navid Navab is on stage. Hundreds of people crowd in the dark train hall and watch him, who behaves like a master of ceremony, dj and cook at the same time. Every grate of vegetables, every cut into the meat, every sizzling egg in the pan is amplified a thousand times, sonified and supported by electronic sounds. The audience is paralyzed and mesmerized.

Translated from German, Martin Bürkl, Deutschlandfunk Kulturem, 2016

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. Believing buttons, gadgets and dials come at the cost of a certain level of inescapable artificiality, he instead works to explore ways to create organic interactions between player and instrument. Whether that instrument is a balloon, a horse’s skull, a cactus, or an eggplant, he believes sonic beauty is the direct successor of embodied intuition and improvised play.

Katrina Jurjans, CUJAH Art Journal, 2015

Navab’s work, can turn something as unmusical as an eggplant into an evolving percussion instrument. The object transmutes itself depending on how we touch it. Its morphing underneath your fingers. And it’s that almost natural relationship between real-world objects and the program’s output that, when done right, makes augmented reality so, well, real.

Colin Harris, Reality ++, The Link Newspaper, 2015

I will never look at my food the same way again.

Kim Thuy, La Fabrique de Kim, Fabrique Culturelle, 2015

Practices of Everyday Life | Cooking is a rare, unique, and powerful interactive multimedia performance that challenges our perception of everyday objects. With a tangible reward that invites the viewer into a world that otherwise seems surreal, Navab experiments with perception. And isn’t that what theatre is all about? It is strangely disorienting yet completely beautiful to watch.

M. Cristall, BeatRoute Magazine, 2017

Boundaries blur between matter, sound and what we perceive to be inanimate, as vegetables and cooking implements come alive.

Theresa Howell, The Source Newspaper, 2017

Ce ballet pluri-sensoriel est une invitation au questionnement du statut des éléments naturels dans nos pratiques quotidiennes et des nouvelles technologies dans le concept de création. Ainsi, Navid Navab invite l’auditoire à oublier sa propre expérience de la « cuisine » pour le guider vers une nouvelle trajectoire – en faisant l’emphase sur l’imperceptible devenu enfin palpable.

Diane Martin-Graser, SMCQ's Musique Contemporaine Blog, 2015

艺术家Navid Navab打造了一场多媒体厨房音乐会，它让表演者即兴的操作桌面的食物、厨具和香料，并作出夸张的肢体动作，而这一过程都会被摄影头捕捉并投影在背后屏幕上，现场表演、声音、气味、画面融为一体，使观众沉浸在多感官体验中，艺术家借此展现了一种独特的日常诗意美学，也是对试听演出的一次大胆尝试。

MANA, 新媒体艺术站 ,  加拿大：多媒体厨房音乐会 , 2019..09

People will be talking about this performance for a long time!

Ajay Hebel (Director: International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, Artistic director: Guelph Jazz Festival,), Guelph Mercury Tribune Magazine, 2016

Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, Théâtre Gilles-Vigneault, St. Jerome, QC, 06.16.2019

Kiblix Festival, KID KIBLA Portal, Maribor, Slovenia, 10.13.2017

MilanOltre Festival, Teatro Elfo Puccini, Milano, Italy, 10.09.2017

Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival, La Sala Rosa theatre, Montréal, QC, 06.07.2017

Open Space Gallery, Victoria, BC, 02.26.2017

Western Front, Vancouver, BC, 02.23-24.2017

Guelph Jazz Festival, Guelph, ON, 09.15.2016

Ars Electronica Festival, Opening Concert Night, PostCity, Linz, Austria, 09.08.2016

MNM: Montreal/New Musics Festival, Agora Hydro Quebec, Montréal, QC, 03.02.2015