Haunted Weather is from a series of work creating imagined audio spaces, places, journeys — immersions into imaginary audio experiences. Composed with a mixture of field recordings, instrumental scoring, samples, and heavy processing to create soundscapes that seem to morph between "composed" and "unfolding" in time.

Graceful Degradation explores the fragile boundary between signal and noise, meaning and error. Across four movements, it examines how sound degrades and is reinterpreted—through corrupted files, shattered glass, neural misfires, and overtrained AI. From digital detritus repackaged as mechanical acoustics, to algorithmic hallucinations of speech, the piece invites listeners to witness the collapse and reconstruction of sonic meaning. Each section reveals the tension between human and machine perception, where distortion becomes form and noise becomes narrative.

Praised by The New York Times for her “appealingly melancholic sound” and “entertaining array of distortion effects,” Alexandria Smith is a multimedia artist, audio engineer, scholar, trumpeter, and educator who enjoys working at the intersection of all these disciplines. Her research focuses on integrating critical-making  methods into instrument design and creating interactive musical systems, installations, and  instruments. She also builds wearable instruments that incorporate biofeedback and sensor  technology to explore embodiment and listening.

Caroline Louise Miller (they/them) is a US composer based in Portland, Oregon. Common themes addressed in their work include affect, ecology, labor politics, tactility, materiality of media, dreams, and hidden dimensions of reality or history, often within dreamlike musical spaces that  thread field recordings, shimmering textures, and romantic melodic lines through harsh noise and  clattering dissonances. They have enjoyed wide-ranging collaborations, including works for  musical theater, short film, contemporary chamber ensemble, installation, acousmatic fixed 

media, field recording, improvisation, and jazz big band.

An artist, researcher and writer working at the intersection of sound arts, experimental pedagogy and critical theory. His book Listening After Nature is published by Bloomsbury, 2022/23.

Wright’s practice investigates relations between humans and animals, geographies and technologies, observers and subjects. Ongoing questions include: how does environmental sound convey complex geopolitical meaning? How can technology be practiced with an eco-critical sensitivity and how might listening operate beyond the human? Working between the field and lab, site and gallery, he is committed to amplifying forms of power and poetics within the creative use of sound and documentary media.

Helena Hunter works at the intersections of visual art, poetry and performance. Her artworks utilise critical poetic and performative modes in relation to environmental change and biodiversity loss, often blending sites such as the field, lab, gallery, archive and museum. She has a Master’s in Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. 

Researcher in Residence at The Scottish Association of Marine Science (SAMS), 2024. Helena Hunter is working with Marine Biologists near Oban on the Scottish west coast, contributing to the Toxic Phytoplankton Monitoring program, the Experimental Seaweed Farms, and working with the world's most diverse Culture Collection of Algae and Protozoa.

Ice Queen (Aurora Josephson) is a musician and visual artist currently residing in Portland, Oregon. Building on Aurora’s foundation of operatic training and a BA and an MFA in Music Performance from Mills College, she has forged a bold and vocal style that is uniquely her own. To unleash the limitless range of sonic possibilities in the voice, Aurora employs a variety of extended and unconventional techniques drawn from the worlds of contemporary composition, improvisation, and rock. 

ICE QUEEN will perform creating a mesmerizing and evocative work featuring  DRY ICE, metal objects, and Extended Vocal Techniques.

Dr. Jenny Hutchings has been visiting the ice pack in the Arctic and the Antarctic for almost 25 years, using floating ice camps and icebreakers to research sea ice dynamics. She will share her perspective of this unique environment. Describing the ice scape, a thin cover of ice that separates the deep ocean from air, through its sound.

This term Jenny is teaching a “Cryosphere, Climate and Society” that explores the intersections of the frozen parts of our planet with humanity. Ice provides water and food security to over 2 billon people. The ice cover over land, oceans and in our atmosphere cools the planet, regulating our temperature. But also, this ice can greatly amplify planetary wide change, being at a critical point between frozen and liquid water on our planet creates large shifts in climate that we must understand to navigate our changing environment.  

Swendsen received his Ph.D. in Music Composition and Computer Technologies from the University of Virginia, where he was in residence as a Jefferson Scholars Fellow and Instructor in the McIntire Department of Music from 2002-2006. He received his MFA from the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, and his BM the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Swendsen spent the 2006-07 academic year in residence as a Fulbright Fellow at the NoTAM computer music studios in Oslo, Norway, where he worked on a large project based in soundscape composition and ecoacoustics. His subsequent compositions combine live instruments with electronics to shape an experience of place for the listener. He has created over forty scores for dance, including recent collaborations with choreographers Amy Miller (NYC), David Shimotakahara (Cleveland), Mary Carbonara (San Francisco), and Ashley Thorndike (Washington, DC).

Swendsen’s music has been heard throughout the United States, much of Europe, and also in South America and Asia in recent years. His research on soundscape composition, interdisciplinary performance practice, and interactive technologies has been presented and published by SEAMUS, ICMC, NIME, EMS, and others in the US and Europe. His most recent writing examines the relationship between electroacoustic music and contemporary dance. Recent performances of his compositions include events in New York City, Boston, Montreal, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, and Oslo, which have featured the playing of eighth blackbird, Jennifer Torrence, Thomas Rosenkranz, Terri Hron, Ryan Nestor, Rootstock Percussion, the EAR Duo and many other wonderful musicians.

Anthony J. Stillabower presents an improvisation shaped by voice, feedback percussion, and machine learning algorithms. Situated at the threshold of audibility, his approach to sound inhabits a terrain of friction and flow, where presence flickers between memory and material flux.

Guided by Annea Lockwood’s observation that 'rivers create their sound by the way they interact with the materials in their banks through friction', this performance asks: What is the source of a sound? Is something sounding now?

Listening becomes a percolation—of a music, an environment, a moment.

Playing becomes the sediment of what has been remembered—vitalizing manifold mixtures, toward a gust of something unlearned.

Cleavon Smith’s immersive theater project The Fillmore Eclipse, based on Bop City, a restaurant and jazz club located in San Francisco’s historic Fillmore District opened in April 2024. Cleavon’s other plays include The Incrementalist, The Flats (co-written with Lauren Gunderson and Jonathan Spector), and The Last Sermon of Sister Imani which was nominated for a 2018 Theatre Bay Area Best Production award. Cleavon’s most recent works include script consulting on The Elvis Experience, an immersive show, produced in London and opening in July 2025 and a commissioned adaptation of Tyler Merritt’s I Take My Coffee Black. He has also received commissions for a short play about Oregon Black pioneers and adaptations of the children’s book Imani’s Moon as well as Romeo and Juliet for which he received an Aurand Harris Theatre and a Folger Shakespeare Library grant respectively. This will be Cleavon’s first performance ever…if you don’t include a high school show he did thirty-five years ago.

About the project:

The Poet readies themself for the first day of what they hope will be a daily exercise of writing a Golden Shovel poem. The original poem will be chosen by an audience member, and in fifteen minutes, The Poet will attempt to complete their Golden Shovel response amid the sparks of inspiration, the chatter of personal doubt, and the noise from the outside world drip drip dripping into their artistic practice. Every second holds the possibility of success or failure; every second is a negotiation with the meanings of success and failure. What we see/hear/experience can only be described by what we witness. Let’s play!

Todd Fadel is getting up there in years. He’s always wanted to be Kermit the Frog, but found out they weren’t hiring. (True Story) So, he went on to create stages to share (The Push, TOM Festival, Meow Meow, Wild Goose Festival) and perform on in his home town of Portland, Oregon.  Simply not satisfied by this, he went to school to get his (dream) job - elementary music teacher for Portland Public Schools.  There, he’s facilitated the making of a radio station, record label, VR music creator summit, music theatre intensive and regular justice and arts night. Which is cool.

Todd Fadel curates creative cacophony and he has moved on from this reality to the virtual realm to continue his effervescent efforts - his sights narrowly focused on VR app, Patchworld. 

Considered a “new breed of instrumental specialist,” (New Music Buff) Catherine Lee offers “immaculate, masterful oboe playing” (The Double Reed) in combination with inspired and discerning musicality across an impressive range of genres and styles. With a Juno Award nomination, Lee’s second solo album, Remote Together (2021 – Redshift), received unanimously positive reviews from an international array of media. Lee also creates music, textile, video and photography pieces inspired by, and in collaboration with Bombyx mori, the domesticated silk moth, creatively illuminating the life stages and silk cocoons of these amazing creatures. 

Water Walk (2025) features field recordings of places that I feel particularly connected to i

ncluding the sounds after a particularly heavy rain fall on Mount Tabor (PDX, OR), from behind North Falls in Silver Falls State Park (OR), and winter activities on ice/snow (Edmonton, Canada). A blended track of these sounds will be sent directly into the Scuffed Computer Improviser, programmed by Taylor Brook, which listens, learns, and improvises with the sounds that it has heard. I will improvise with the sounds produced by the SCI in real-time. Throughout, I will be guided by the ideas of memory and home.

Christopher Lock is an electronic musician, creative programmer, violist, film composer, and educator currently based in Asheville, NC. He creates densely textural electronic music which slowly mutates and morphs over time and is often saturated with abstract imagery of the natural world and biological phantasmagoria. His unique musical practice is a synthesis of traditions ranging from Baltimore area noise and experimental music, where he first started working with sound, to his background as a modern classical Violist.  Christopher received his Ph.D in Music Composition (with supporting courses in Computer Science at the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) at Harvard University. His dissertation, “Resonant Simulacra: Building Artificially Intelligent Instruments, A Portfolio of Musical Compositions, and a Self-Analysis of a Cybernetic Workstream,” documents the development and implementation processes of his recent techno-musical endeavors. The dissertation focuses partially on building artificially intelligent musical instruments using Small Data. He holds a Master’s Degree in Music from Harvard, a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Music from Johns Hopkins University (Peabody Conservatory), and a second Bachelor's degree in Viola Performance (also from Hopkins).

Jason Fick is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Music Technology and Production at Oregon State University, where he teaches courses in composition, audio technologies, and music production. His research explores relationships between commercial and experimental media, and has been published by Audio Engineering Society, Organised Sound, International Community on Auditory Display, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Journal of General Music Education, and College Music Society. As a composer, his electronic music has been performed at academic and public concerts, festivals, and conferences throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia, including ICMC, NYCEMF,  SEAMUS, WOCMAT, ICAD, CMS, ATMI, Electroacoustic Barndance, International Horn Symposium, and International Tribunal on Fracking and Human Rights. Jason is a past President of College Music Society Northwest Chapter and is the current Vice President for the Association of Technology in Music Instruction (ATMI).

My artwork creates an intuitive conduit between technology and nature, simultaneously injecting each into the other. I am constantly intrigued by the physical sensations of invisible yet palpable phenomena in the natural world, imaging these ephemeral, transient experiences, creating physical artworks from digital drawings to digital fiber and installations. Developing algorithms embodying mathematical descriptions of these phenomena in nature, translating them into code, creating artwork that materializes this data. experience.

Truckenbrod’s artwork was included in international exhibitions and at The Whitney Museum of American Art titled Programmed: Rules, Codes and Choreographiies in Art, 1965 - 2018. The Whitney has acquired four coded algorithmic drawings from 1975 and a digital textile created in 1979 for their Digital Art Collection.

Rooted in eco-feminism, eco-poetics, rock n’ roll, and post-apocalypse studies, Sasha Petrenko’s interdisciplinary practice blends, sculpture, theater, video and sound. Petrenko’s projects have been featured widely at national and international venues including the Kebbel Villa in Schwandorf, Germany, Kulturfolger in Zurich Switzerland, the Performance Studies International Conference in Melbourne Australia, the Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards in Seattle, the Los Angeles County Arboretum, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Sasha has received residencies and fellowships from Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, NY, and the Montello Foundation in Nevada. Her interviews and projects have been featured on college and public radio stations including University of California Berkeley’s KALX, and NPR affiliates KNKX in Washington state and KALW in San Francisco. Sasha is currently Associate Professor of Sculpture and Expanded Media at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.

Melody Owen aka Pearl Hyacinth is an artist from Portland, Oregon. She is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery. She builds in several virtual worlds and uses her conceptual collage methodology across many disciplines. Pearl Hyacinth is her representative in-worlds and in the cleanNFT community.

Her mediums include hand cut and digital collage, curation, video, photography, 3D building in and for VR, and site-specific installation. She has shown her work at the Portland Art Museum, Nine Gallery, PDX Gallery, the Art Gym, Reed College, and many other venues and festivals around Portland, the United States, and the world. For the last year, she has also been actively involved in the cleanNFT movement.

Rhapsody in Gray

This Oregon Sea Grant-funded print features the five-foot wide silhouette of a gray whale,the iconic resident of Oregon’s coastal waters. The images within the silhouette highlight coastal ecosystems, how they function, and the biodiversity of the reef ecology. 

I collaborated with marine scientists, conservationists, historians and members of the Coquille Indian Tribe to select the images contained within the print. The print is accompanied by an augmented reality experience that includes videos from these sources in their own words. The videos feature music by Joshua Phillips, inspired by gray whale vocalizations.

Julia Bradshaw is Professor Emerita at Oregon State University where she taught photography and video art from 2012 to 2024. Her video-art and photography projects exhibit throughout the United States, Guatemala, The Netherlands, Poland, and Germany. Her work is in the Getty Research Collection, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco collection, Oakland Museum of Art and is part of the Oregon State Public Art collection installed at Western Oregon University. She received her MFA from San José State University in 2007. She has attended artist residencies at Djerassi in California and Playa in Oregon. Both of these residencies were supported by a grant from the Ford Family Foundation. In 2020 she was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship by the Oregon Arts Commission.