tangibleFlux φ plenumorphic ∴ chaosmosis

triptych, kinetic sculptures
premiere: Ars Electronica, Linz 2018; V2.0 at Sight&Sound, Montreal Oct 2019

In search for the hidden mysteries of matter from the borders of tabletop astrophysics and natural fiction, three microcosms orchestrate states of sensory access to the phenomenological emergence of order out of chaos. 

T r a n S e n s e s

performance: contemporary dance, responsive scenography
premiere: Japan Society NY 2017

Movements of dancer Akiko Kitamura morph under the responsive audiovisual architecture of media alchemist Navid Navab.

AQUAPHONEIA

alchemical sound installation
world premiere: Ars Electronica 2016
revision: 2018

Aquaphoneia is an alchemical installation centred around the poiesis of time and the transmutation of voice into matter. A large horn mid-space echoes the ghost of Edison’s machine. But unlike early recording, this odd assemblage transmutes voice into water and water into air. Vocal sounds falling into the depths of the horn are calcinated, and liquified: The aqueous voice then flows into three alchemical chambers where inner time is surrendered to the tempi of matter: unbound, yet lucid and sound.

Practices of Everyday Life | Cooking

av concert for chef and enchanted kitchenette
premiere: Montreal/New Musics Festival 2015
world premiere (revision): Ars Electronica 2016

A culinary concert organized around a chef, an enchanted kitchenette, and sonified ingredients. The cook wields foods, pans and spices, transmuted gesturally into spatialized sound and painterly light within a responsive scenography. 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.

崩壊 Decay 2.0

performance: new music, enchanted objects
premiere: Montreal/New Musics Festival 2015

For the 4th anniversary of Japan’s Fukushima triple catastrophe and in the light of many other natural and man-made disasters that humans face everyday, Navab’s Decay encourages us to recognize the material world as a platform for enlightened practices: to press against, to locate resonance, to situate the body, and to engage the world as a site of buried sound. In 2015, elements from the original installation have been staged for the trio to perform in short interludes. Performers interact with natural and artificial found objects, acoustically transmuted into sculptural electronic instruments, evoking post tsunami debris. Modulated through movement, objects sing of their past lives and continually recompose themselves into new meanings. Through varied augmentation of the objects’ acoustical response, the natural and the synthetic collapse in immediate vibrational relation, whispering that perhaps we are produced by objects as much as we create them.

THREADS

Oana Setu + Navid Navab, 2014, installation, kinetic responsive sound sculpture
premiere: PHI Center, Biennale Internationale D’Art Numérique

Threads is an interactive installation that dwells with the mnemonic dimension of the written word and puts under the magnifying glass the acts of reading and writing in an intricate play of sensorial relations.

Practices of Everyday Life | Mixology

2014, performative intervention

for mixologist, enchanted cocktail shakers, responsive sound, light sync.

Navid Navab’s gestural-sonic compositions fuse with his unorthodox craft mixology to give birth to an array of synaesthetic cocktails in Practices of Everyday Life | Mixology which will invite you to shake, drink and mix up a multitude of senses.

At the bar… you may order a drink of your choice! Each drink is a poetic infusion of gesture, sound, light, flavour, colour, texture and scent. A continuous blend of materials, active media, innovative forms of interaction, bold flavours, sonic immateriality and physical reality becomes intertwined to penetrate our sensory expectations, social relations and habitual consumerism.


F O L D S

2014, contemporary dance / responsive scenography
Katia-Marie Germain (Choreography) + Navid Navab (Interactive AV Scenography) + Lenka Novak

F O L D S deploys itself on perceptual grounds. Turning into image and turning into body, a performative environment merges powerful optical architectures, compositions of structure born sound, and the aesthetics of chiaroscuro image, and envelops the spectator in the performative,  theatrical, and cinematic experience of self and the other.’

S T E E R

2013-2015, dance / responsive scenography
Zata Ohm Dance + Navab + Delapierre

Steer exposes imaginary inner worlds through a fusion of biology, and technology. The performance establishes a bridge to a dreamlike state and manifests thousand hidden worlds into a lucid reality.

Einstein’s Dreams

2013, responsive environment
Environment / Installation

A set of time conditioning installations and techniques that create palpable alternatives to the everyday time that’s governed by calendars, universal clocks, and Internet services that never sleep. A new architecture of kinetic material and digital media in which time becomes an elastic medium of expression, learning, and invention - a new art of time for the 21c.

Suspended Narratives

Mere Phantoms + Navid Navab
2013, responsive environment / shadow and sound play
McCord Museum

Nights of interactive shadow puppetry and sonic gestural compositions. The audience is invited to make paper cutouts of invented architecture and to add them into a cumulative installation. To bring the microcosm to life, audience members will use mobile lights to activate soundscapes and animate three-dimensional shadows. The installation was enchanted with light-sensitive sonic postcards that were embedded into each paper-cut vignette and activated as participants approached the piece with hand-held lights. The result was an interactive cinematic experience that recounted embedded memories in ever folding narratives. 


Les Persiennes Et Les Sortilèges

2013, responsive membrane / public intervention
Goethe Institute: Nuit Blanche

Someone's behind those Venetian blinds. A finger slips over an edge and pulls them down. Two fingers, four. A pair of lips mouth your name. Then eyes appear from a darkened room, seeking to connect with those on the other side. Who is it? And how does he or she know you, standing at the window, if she's only a ghost of a ghost. A seductive, beguiling interactive work veiling and unveiling perceptions. Who is the seer, and who or what the seen? Come to the Goethe Institute / La Nuit blanche, when *Alkemie animates the windows with responsive video-performers haunting video-persiennes.

崩壊 Decay - 手向け TAMUKE

2011, installation+performance
SAT, Montreal

Decay 崩壊 is an interactive sound installation/performance, first conceived spontaneously in March 2011 for the ”手向け Tamuke” Solidarity with Japan event. In view of ongoing triple catastrophe that hit Japan in summer 2011 - the magnitude 9.0 earthquake, the tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear emergency - and also in view of many other natural and man-made disasters that humans face everyday, Decay encourages us to recognize the material world as a platform for enlightened practices: to press against, to locate resonance, to situate the body, and to engage the world as a site of buried sound. Decay 崩壊 invites audiences and performers to interact with natural and artificial found objects acoustically transmuted into sculptural electronic instruments, evoking post tsunami debris. Modulated through movement, objects sing of their past lives and continually recompose themselves into new meanings. Through varied augmentation of the object’s acoustical response, the natural and the synthetic collapse in immediate vibrational relation, whispering that perhaps we are produced by objects as much as we create them.

Constellation

2009-2010, responsive tensile architecture
Electric Eclectics Festival, 2009
Timisoara Festival at D’arc terrace, Romania, 2010
Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal, 2010

Constellation series are responsive, multi-media environments, expressed through sound, light and movement in the form of architecture.
It is an interactive installation that engages visitors with their surroundings in order to create a unique spatial experience sensitive to the site. Constellation is responsive to natural and man-made physical pressures in the built environment...

Interstitial

2008-2010, av performance / responsive membrane

Interstitial is an interactive audio-visual performance/installation by Navid Navab and Jerome Delapierre, an improvisational performance piece for an interactive screen, a dancing body, and live audio/video processing.

By augmenting a stretchable projection surface with sensors and responsive technology, we map movement and vibration to audio-visual textures. Relative to physical and spatial qualities of the screen, meaningful and playable mappings were created from gestures and vibrations to sound and video. During performances we continuously transform the screen's responsive qualities by performing it's mapping-space. Upon touching the screen and interacting with it, players discover that they can charge their gestures with emotion and meaning, and use their interactions for improvised play.

BUBBLEpop

2009, in-situ intervention / responsive architecture
Metro Entrance, Montreal

gesturalSound Intervention BUBBLEpop is an analog interactive sound installation intended for a public foot-traffic. The floor of a public space is covered with sheets of jumbo bubble-wrap that people are invited or even forced to walk over, popping bubbles and transforming the surrounding audio-visual environment. Through the joyous act of popping air bubbles with varying speed and intensities, the passersby gesturally shape the video projections in effect.

CCA 20:20

2009, responsive light / in-situ installation
Canadian Center for Architecture 2009

Immersive active lighting installation for the Canadian Center for Architecture's 20 Years: 20 Hours event. High-power luminaries aimed at the windows of the adjunct Shaughnessy House fully illuminate the interior. The room is awash with colour while the LEDs animate to depict a low-resolution sunrise and sunset across all four rooms. The speed and quality of the sunset and the colour changes are modulated by a live feed from the DJ and other environmental sounds within the building.


Enactive Walkway

2008, responsive architecture / speculative design
Exposed:Mimic Exhibition, Montreal

Enactive Walkway is a responsive installation that examines the intersection of cognition, embodiment and human experience. The actuation of transparent tiles sets in motion the materials contained within, producing flickering multicolored light that illuminates the tiles, and sound that is collected, processed and played back into the space. Above the Walkway hangs a 2x6-feet print on lenticular lenses that shifts between images of water and broken glass as one walks underneath and watches. Together these elements creates a playful, disorienting, experience that poses the place of embodied knowledge in interaction design.

Frankenstein’s Ghosts

2008-2010, theater / responsive scenography

Frankenstein's Ghosts is simultaneously exploring themes inspired by Shelley's novel and finding monstrous forms of performance practice in the presence of responsive media.

MONSTROUS MUSINGS, UNCONSCIOUS UTTERANCES

Integrating systems, an environment "alive" with possibilities, multiple dimensions,

multiple senses, human performers and non-human agencies in a continuous

blend of active media, innovative forms of interaction, collaborative communications,

immateriality and physical reality becoming intertwined & enriching our thinking.

Pneuma: Falling Forest

by Patrick Harrop, Navid Navab, Topological Media Lab et al.
2008, Responsive Architecture
8th Manifestation Internationale of Champ Libre mtl
eARTS 2008 Festival (HORIZON), China

Pneus aims to construct an immersive experiential condition in which the participant’s impression is that of being within a forest. Air-filled pneumatic sculptures laced with sensors and illuminators breath, filter and re-project data harvested from outside as patterns of light and sound. Pneuma, exists in a world of second nature, a world made by human hands but governed also by electricity, rain, traffic, and gravity.