Pauline Oliveros’s life as a composer, performer, and humanitarian was about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary-dissolving music making. Among her many recent awards were the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Giga-Hertz-Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music, and the John Cage Award from from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She founded Deep Listening, which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation, and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. “Deep Listening is my life practice,” Oliveros explained, simply. She founded the Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer. Her creative work is disseminated through The Pauline Oliveros Trust and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc. 

LuLing Osofsky writes at the intersection of landscape, historical violence and collective memory. She is a PhD candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and her work has been presented and performed at SFMoMA, the Getty, Carnegie Hall, and alpine birch forests around the world.

Tasting Menu is a Los Angeles-based collaboration between Tim Feeney, Cassia Streb, and Cody Putman, exploring instrumental and found sound, movement, tape recorders, door frames, window panes, rainstorms, pine cones, concrete floors, and sonic maps of alien geographies. Recent work includes recordings for Infrequent Seams, Suppedaneum, Full Spectrum, and Mappa record labels, and performances at REDCAT, Coaxial, Human Resources, Avenue 50, and the underwolf summer festival.

Isola tong is a transpinay interdisciplinary artist and architect whose spirit-specific research and practice involve counter-imagination and collaborative place-making embedded in animistic worldviews, incorporating its frictions with postcolonial realities while questioning reigning perspectives of natural science, translated into soundings, gatherings, and visualizations of relational specificities and ecologies. Invested in the mystery of nature, time, as well as intersections of displacement, tong sees her role as a transducer of encountered specters in archaeology, ethnomusicology, the archives, and the built/natural environment, appropriating her rendering of the materials in creating pathways to healing and transformation through community-specific projects that invoke the social. Intersubjectivity is foregrounded in her ritualistic making and site-specific performances in the public realm that problematizes the contradiction of finding belongingness in an itinerant existence. As part of her socially engaged practice, she hosts Transcestral Gatherings, an experimental space for trans and nonbinary Filipinxs in diasporic communities to connect with their complicated heritage, offering respite, affinity, and remembrance through a critical lens. Rooted in collaborative placemaking guided by engaged pedagogy, this transformative practice creates a liminal space for reimagining, reinventing, and reflecting upon our unstable becomings, challenging imperial paradigms.