Program & Artist Bios

Rodrigo Barriga - Spaces I

Spaces is a series of works that explore participants’ relationship to space through sound-based performance. Notated in the form of text instructions, each of the scores in the series determines a specific way for the performers to interact with their surroundings. In Spaces I, participants are asked to consider what it means to become a sound in the space.

Rodrigo Barriga is a performer and composer. His music explores performer interaction and participants’ relationship to space. He’s an active performer and organizer in the Santa Cruz experimental music scene.

Shanna Sordahl - Imprints and Echoes

Imprints and Echoes reflects on ways that one can relate to and interact with an outdoor space, particularly one encountered on a day to day basis. In this iteration, performers walk within and engage with characteristics of the meadow to choose a pattern they find there – visual, sonic, or otherwise perceived – as inspiration for sonic and rhythmic material that they express through vocalization and their walking cadence. The piece invites us to consider new ways of listening to and connecting with our surrounding environment, and how we might process and express that information.

As a composer, performer, and sound artist, Shanna Sordahl uses sound to create spaces that illustrate transformational possibilities and question ingrained patterns of perception. Their work centers timbral and textural development to emphasize interaction with spaces and processes of change. As an active member of the experimental and improvised music communities in the Bay Area and beyond, Shanna has presented work at the Incantations Sound Art Festival, Megapolis Festival, and International SuperCollider Symposium and has had pieces commissioned by The Lab and Other Minds. Shanna holds an MFA from Mills College and is a current DMA student at UCSC.

Maven Maybee - Blue Magic in the Air: DEEP SKY EMBRACE

Why is the sky blue? Embark upon a meditative multisensory entrance into listening to the sky, as a series of synchronous, rhizomatic events are recounted in “listening” to its hues. Oakland-based sound artist Geoff Saba uses Maybee’s samples of blue chimes and of wind passing through a blue plastic pipe to produce an ambient soundscape present, mirroring the “beautiful” manipulation and replication of once “natural” blue hues produced through plastic manufacturing. This “fracturing” of the hue is a gesture inspired through conversation with abolitionist poet Tim Young around the shifting of the meaning of blue due to extractive processes. What does the wind whisper?

Maven Maybee is a geographer, writer, and multimedia player working to deepen relationships between human and more-than-human worlds across image, performance, and text. Their work engages animist collaboration, creating and documenting experiences that explore the nonduality of “self” and “other”. They render visible the often invisible threads connecting us with the worlds beyond our perception: both the intrinsically interconnected nature of Life, and the harmful, exploitative systems we exist in within our current local and global infrastructures. Maybee is currently a Norris Center Art + Science Fellow and MFA candidate in Environmental Art & Social Practice at UC Santa Cruz.

Tin Yi Chelsea Wong - Piano Liberado (Liberated Piano)

Piano Liberado is an instrument developed by Mauro Ffortissimo over decades of exploration, through “years of cacophony and unstructured sound investigation.” Rooted in the lineage of Cacophony Society, Burning Man, underground urban exploration gatherings, and site-specific impermanent installations, this iteration of the liberated piano invites attendees to follow a suggested omakase menu of toys and tools to explore the instrument, and listen deeply to the numerous textures that embody the liberation made only possible from deconstruction.

Pianist Tin Yi Chelsea Wong’s international career spans a wide variety of performance spaces. Appearances include San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts, Grace Cathedral, Salzburg Wienersaal, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. An advocate of contemporary music, she premiered many new works across the Bay Area. With a focus on extended techniques, Chelsea Wong invented the Harmonic Capo to create new possibilities for the instrument, and performs on the Liberated Piano. Her new venue Atelier Kromatica in SOMA of San Francisco presents experimental classical concerts, and hosts an annual Piano Beach Bonfire at Ocean Beach, San Francisco.

Bell Bringers

Seeding the meadow with a surplus of bells. Presented by the Burrow of Investigation.

Burrow of Investigation:

Lala (Lananh Chu) is a listener.

Kevin Corcoran works with sound and listening through percussion and place.

Isabella de la Hoz is a documentary filmmaker and visual artist. Her current research interests include decoloniality, social movements, queer theory, Third Cinema, feminism, collective memory, and arts-based research methods.

Libertad Huerta Rodríguez is a Mexican sociologist and filmmaker, her areas of interest include land defense, extractivism, violence against women and political horizons. For the past six years, she had worked alongside communities and anti-capitalist organizations.

Anna Friz convenes the Burrow, and is Associate Professor in the Film and Digital Media department.

Guest Curator Bios

Marc Perez

Marc Perez is a composer, performer, improviser, artist, author, curator and organization leader whose work is concerned with freedom of agency, access, anti/trans-disciplinary arts & improvisation. 

As a performer, Marc has been featured at various festivals such as High Desert Soundings, Some Things From Nothing Ad-hoc Improv Festival & Angel City Jazz Festival. As a composer, his works have been performed nationally and internationally in spaces ranging from universities and festivals to community resource centers and DIY spaces. Marc is a heavy practitioner of text in combination with sound, often creating text scores, poems, installations & art relating to both sound and text. 

Along with working as a curator for various shows, community focused events, and festivals throughout the year, Marc is also the co-founder and co-director of Sudden Somethings, an organization dedicated to the proliferation of activities, knowledge, research, and communal practices in improvisation across disciplines and non-disciplines.

Marc has recently published a selection of text scores dealing with freedom of speech and democracy, an article through NYU’s Journal of Experimental Practice regarding the erasure of BIPOC culture in Academia, and has an upcoming book of text scores dealing with various types of accessible spaces and deep listening. 

Lukáš Janata

Lukáš Janata, a Czech, Santa Cruz–based artist, explores musical affect in relation to empathy across his work and passion as a composer, educator, director, and organizer. He serves on the board of The Resonance Project, exploring music as a conflict transformation. He instructs at The Walden School and the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music. As a doctoral composition student at the University of California Santa Cruz, Lukáš investigates how musical creativity activates empathetic mechanisms in the brain. For more information, please visit: www.lukasjanata.cz 

Kev Young

Kev is a songwriter and performer with a passion for communal music-making and improvisation. They believe that music should be accessible to everyone as a form of expression and communion with the universe.

Ben Leeds Carson

Ben Leeds Carson’s music is featured internationally in venues for experimental sound, music, and performance, including recently at the Brian Friel Theater (Belfast, 2025), and as part of SUNY Buffalo's 2023-24 Visiting Artist Series; he has been featured at the Smithsonian’s Meyer series (2019), at RISD Los Angeles (2018), and at the Foro Internacional de Música Nueva (2018) in Mexico City. Since 2003, Ben has served the music faculty at UC Santa Cruz, where he has won awards for excellence in teaching, and has contributed to recognition for the campus in justice-focused curriculum design.