Navid Navab (IR/CA) (t{s/he}y) is a media alchemist, multidisciplinary composer, audiovisual sculptor, phono-menologist, perSonifier, gestureBender, and interdisciplinary artist-researcher. Interested in the poetics of schizophonia, gesture, materiality, and embodiment, their work investigates the transmutation of matter and the enrichment of its inherent performative qualities. Making the imperceptible palpable, Navid uses 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.
Navid’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, have been presented internationally at diverse venues such as Ars Electronica, Kapelica Gallery Slovenia, device_art triennial Zagreb, NEMO Bienniale Paris, Sonica Glasgow, Eufònic Barcelona, Canadian Center for Architecture, Kiblix Slovenia, Japan Society NY, 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, International Digital Arts Biennial Montreal, Musiikin Aika Finland, Festival International Montréal/Nouvelles Musiques, milanOltre Festival, Timisoara Romania, CURRENTS New Media Festival Santa Fe, Electric Eclectics Festival Meaford, Pop Montreal, Monument-National TANGENTE, among others.
As a researcher, Navid has been leading interdisciplinary experiments for the past several years, 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 McGill Montreal [Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire en musique médias et technologie], CNMAT Berkeley [Center for New Music and Audio Technologies], CAMP TUM Munich [Computer Aided Medical Procedures & Augmented Reality group at Technical University of Munich], Milieux institute /Hexagram Network Montreal, and CIID [Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design].
Navid currently directs the Topological Media Lab (TML), where she leverages 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.
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
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
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
Putting together a molecule out of the sensory stuff of ordinary life, 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
statement on computational matter
I maintain the view that computation is foremost a material process, non-linear, largely indeterminate, vibrant with life, and irreducible to deterministic models. Coming from this stance, my artistic process aims to preserve the richness of uncanny 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.
statement 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.