Navid Navab: Practices of Everyday Life | Cooking Original

Practices of Everyday Life | Cooking Navid Navab - culinary concert for chef, an enchanted kitchenette, and sonified ingredients - 2015 - 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. At a time when capitalizable efficiencies drive everyday actions, it is most relevant to suggest new gestural trajectories into our everyday routines. By disconnecting gestures from their anticipated meanings we create purposeful misunderstandings, allowing the audience to extract new meanings from the otherwise familiar cooking related tasks. Practices of Everyday Life | Cooking reflects Navab’s continued interest in the enactment of dynamic performative ecologies that allow for poetic and virtuosic improvisation with computationally enriched materials and environments. As the chef prepares a meal, sections emerge from culinary tasks to form multisensory tableaus. Each tableau is a unique gestural sound composition undertaking phenomenological reconsideration of the musical event at whole. 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, performer-performed, instrument-score, and intention-noise. 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 gestural media, allowing the composer to retain an aesthetic nostalgia for and yet mash many realms such as ritualized sound art, videomusic, music actuelle, dronscape, glitch, microsound, music concrete, vaporwave, and plunderphonics.