Navid Navab

Navid Navab
Practices of Everyday Life | Cooking
culinary concert for chef and enchanted kitchenette
Friday, 13 October 2017, 19:00
KIBLA Portal, Valvasorjeva 40, Maribor
KIBLIX 2017 Pre-event

NAVID NAVAB
artistic direction, concept, composition, real-time sound, interactive
scenography

MARIUSZ OSTROWSKI
performance

FERID SANAA
real-time responsive video

A synaesthetic performance organized around a chef, an enchanted kitchenette, and sonified ingredients.
The cook wields foods, pans and spices, transmuted gesturally into sound and image in an innovative culinary choreography. A knife rasps against another, onions vocalize their unfolding mutation into a cacophonus 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.

Cooking, the most ancient art of transmutation, has become a domestic practice over centuries. In this everyday practice, things perish, transform, and nourish other things. By augmenting the meats, wood, and metal, with sound and painterly light, we stage a performance made from the movements and gestures of cooking.

”Practices of Everyday Life | Cooking” is a Comprovisational concert that focuses foremost on poetic gesture-sound correlations and sonic Gesture Bending. It is a compositional exploration of the interplay between the senses, poetics of enchantment and materiality, and the ethico-aesthetics of everyday practices. The performance features a virtuosic chef/dancer who wields foods, knives, pans and spices transmuted gesturally into real time sound instruments. Gestural sound compositions and responsive imagery unfold in realtime as the chef playfully prepares a meal with computationally enriched ingredients.

Making the imperceptible palpable, these performances utilize Navab's cutting edge gestural sound research, software, and acoustic sensing techniques to symbolically charge everyday actions and objects in ways that combine the composer’s design with the performer’s contingent nuance. By interactively varying the augmentation of an object’s natural acoustical response, we eliminate the a priori distinction between the synthetic/natural, instrument/score, intention/noise, or performer/performed. Performing or improvising music could then turn into an open engagement with matter, borrowing elements from “play”, day to day living, performance art, and the movement arts.

http://www.practicesofeverydaylife.com/about.html
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https://vimeo.com/123071935
montage from live concert footage

Co-production Navid Navab and Montreal/New Music Festival (MNM) 2015
Topological Media Lab research collaboration 2012–2013
Matralab residency 2014