Face Value: Not Our Parents’ Mirror – Kameshia M. Hunter

>> Website: www.sincerelymeeshproduction.com

>> Instagram: @sincerelymeeshproductions

Face Value: Not Our Parents’ Mirror is an immersive sound installation exploring the beauty rules many Black and Brown women were taught to  carry — and what it means to decide for yourself what you keep. Through  touch, voice, and reflection, visitors move through inherited expectations  as the body speaks, the mirror responds, and the final decision belongs to them. This work is part memory, part interruption, and part release. 

 Holding Still; Still Holding – Lyn Goeringer

>> Website: www.lyngoeringer.com/portfolio/

>> Instagram: @lyngoeringer

Holding Still; Still Holding is an audio-visual diary that reflects on superfund sites around Baltimore, Maryland. Comprised of audio and video recordings taken at superfund locations throughout the city, the artist contemplates their own personal connections to superfund sites 1700 miles away in Colorado, and considers how remediation at these locations is less about fully recovering the land than making them economically viable. 

Resource/Interplay – Matthew Maker

>> Website: www.mattarts.org

>> Instagram: @matthew.maker

Resource/Interplay is an experiential work (auditory, tactile, visual and participatory) that expresses the beauty of simple chaotic processes found in cold climates. The art invites audiences to intimately experience physical systems of melt and flow, gravity, light and reflection. These abstractions distantly mirror ordinary experience, reminding us that even puddles have a complex and subtle beauty and represent a world and climate to cherish as sacred.

Sonic Inheritance – Cheyenne Hendrickson

>> Website: www.cheyennehendrickson.com

>> Instagram: @cheye_nnehendrickson

Sonic Inheritance is a wearable organ sculpture containing seven internal tumors, each mirroring and translating their genetic portrait into sound through field recordings, Geofón-captured movements, and contact-mic improvisations. Artist Hendrickson says “I am prone to developing tumors. My genes misspell my DNA the way I sometimes misspell words, shaping a new body, a mutation, a different language written into me.” The work asks how we all come to know our internal worlds, the parts that slip, gurgle, and work in silence, and whether that which the body makes within can be heard, felt, and held rather than feared. Try on this wearable art, hold it in your hands, place it over your head, and listen through your own body to what your inside sounds like.

The Future Memories Project - Chloe Smolarski, Tasha Darbes

>> Website: www.chloesmolarski.com

>> Instagram: @elevatorbingo

The Future Memories Project occupies an art history slide cabinet that houses audio excerpts of climate memories and soundscapes activated as drawers are opened. A speculative audio piece set in Washington, DC – sometime in the future – plays on a tape recorder, placing the visitor at the center of the experience. The visitor, now an interlocutor in the making of meaning, explores the drawers, mapping their own path through an array of memories and layered, collaged soundscapes.

Together – Emily Sage

>> Website: www.emilysagemusic.com

>> Instagram: @emilysagemusic

Together is a technology-based, interactive sound art sculpture that celebrates the beauty of human connection and the importance of cultivating empathy for strangers. When participants join hands to bridge two larger-than-life figures, a chorus of voices can be heard— a joyful response to the simple, shared gesture of holding hands. This piece is not just an invitation to interact with art, but to interact with each other.

Tree of Life – David Cardona, Alvaro Morales, Anna Schwartz aka Bloom Studio

>> Websites: David Cardona – www.sound-architect.com, Álvaro Morales – www.alvaro-morales.com, Anna Schwartz – www.annajschwartz.com

>> Instagram: David Cardona – @soundarchitect_dcb, Álvaro Morales – @ajmorales, Anna Schwartz – @anna.j.schwartz

Tree of Life is an interactive installation driven by a custom ten-foot tree-like sculpture with embedded sound and lights. The sonics and lighting of the sculpture will react to how participants navigate the installation space. Audiences are invited to explore collective expression through this centralized output of real-time music and lighting, building novel sensory experiences based on collaboration and collective interplay.

Please register for our free workshops (links in the entries below). Space is limited.

Tactile Sound Sculpture Workshop – Dan Ortiz Leizman

Saturday May 2, Sunday May 3 at 10:30 am, 11:30 am, and 1:30 pm

Register here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/e/1057998/

Build your own sound sculpture with the DMV’s very own Dan Ortiz Leizman. Join a free 40-minute workshop where participants of all ages become contemporary sculptors. Using cardboard along with mini transducers, Dan Ortiz Leizman guides participants to position contact mics to capture voices and movement. Sound is mirrored back as vibration, creating an accessible, hands-on exploration of embodied sound.

*Registration capped at 10 people per session

*Children under 8 should be accompanied by an adult 

Immersive Sound Walk: Inaudible Cities: Here, Now, There, and Then - Jacek Tadeusz Smolicki

Sunday May 3 at 11:30 am, 1:30 pm, 3:30 pm

Register here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/e/1058087/

Inaudible Cities: Here, Now, There, and Then is a guided soundwalk that turns ordinary city infrastructure into four classic elements. Equipped with special audio receivers, participants are guided through an itinerary that is both carefully designed and open to spontaneous encounters. Water fountains, switchboards, ventilation shafts, sewers, and cobblestones are processed in real time, and transformed into sonic mirrors of the elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Sounds gradually weave into a composition that opens portals to fragile environments documented by Smolicki during their fieldwork in the Pacific West Coast, Arctic Circle, the Canaveral Seashore, and other vulnerable landscapes.

*Duration: 35-40 minutes

*All-ages welcome, Children under 12 require adult supervision and must be registered separately (to ensure there is enough equipment available for all).

Performances:

Reflections on Machaut: An immersion by the DMV Regenerate! Orchestra – Clay Gonzalez, Wesley Hornpetrie, The Regenerate! Orchestra

11 am both Saturday May 2 and Sunday May 3 on the Plaza (outdoor stage)

>> Website: www.claygonzalez.com, www.wesleyhornpetrie.com

>> Instagram: @the_regenerate_orchestra, @regenerate_orchestra_dmv

The Regenerate! Orchestra presents an immersive reimagining of Messe de Nostre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut. A thirty-person orchestra will perform the first movement (Kyrie) as an antiphonal drone composition with found percussion elements. The alien, mesmerizing harmonies of the 14th-century ars nova style are smeared out and spatialized, allowing the audience to physically inhabit and linger within a beautiful musical mirror.

Duality - Wendel Patrick

12 pm both Saturday May 2 and Sunday May 3 on the Plaza (outdoor stage)

>> Website: www.wendelpatrick.com

>> Instagram: @wendelpatrickofficialmusic

Wendel Patrick’s performance is an exploration of the relationship between himself and his twin brother (who did not survive birth). Patrick uses manipulated sound, recorded spoken text, and auditory expression in this performance. Patrick, born “Kevin Gift,” also uses the first and  middle name of his twin brother “Wendel Patrick Gift” in artistic performance.

still, life - slowdanger

1 pm both Saturday May 2 and Sunday May 3 on the Plaza (outdoor stage)

>> Website: www.slowdangerslowdanger.com

>> Instagram: @slowdanger__

still, life is a durational performance trio that stages the body as a shifting sculptural instrument and uses chainmail, plexiglass, and embodied sound to expose multiple realities unfolding at once. As audiences navigate the Plaza, they experience a live “distant mirror” where material, architecture, and time echo and refract one another.

Synth Rejection Therapy - Megan Hattie Stahl

2 pm both Saturday May 2 and Sunday May 3 on the Plaza (outdoor stage)

>> Website: www.meganhattiestahl.com

>> Instagram: @megan__hattie

This sample-based modular synthesizer performance explores the universal experience of rejection. Recordings of crowdsourced rejection letters are looped, reversed and manipulated until their words lose all meaning. The result is a collective processing and live transformation of difficult ideas into music and noise.

Failed Future Bodies - Wednesday Kim, Dan Ortiz Leizman

3 pm both Saturday May 2 and Sunday May 3 in the Ring Auditorium (lower level, indoors)

>> Website: www.wednesdaykim.xyz, www.danortizleizman.com

>> Instagram: @wednesdaykimm, @apocalypsephenomenology

Failed Future Bodies is an endurance performance where two motion-captured performers attempt, and fail, to sustain a shared seated posture. Their strained breathing through harmonicas forms a looping soundscape. A projected digital world mirrors their struggles, creating a painful and haunting reflection on rest, failure, and the unstable “wild west” terrain of our digital future.

PLASTICPHONIA - Plastic Trash Composed Into Music / A Hymn Against Climate Change - Crystn Hunt Akron

4 pm both Saturday May 2 and Sunday May 2 in the Ring Auditorium (lower level, indoors)

>> Website: www.crystn-hunt-akron.com

>> Instagram: @crystn.hunt.akron_music

Plasticphonia is an interdisciplinary music project by CRYSTN HUNT AKRON that transforms sounds from plastic waste into music tracks. Transforming environmental awareness into  electronic club music, the project creates an immersive audiovisual live performance supported by multimedia artist TOFA’s 3D animations and sound-reactive visuals. This innovative work blends sustainability, media art, and club culture into a powerful, poetic experience.

Made possible with support from the Austrian Cultural Forum