2025 Featured Artists and Works

*More information coming soon— this page updates daily.

>> Visit us at Hirshhorn

Installations:

Echo Nexus – David Cardona, Alvaro Morales, Anna Schwartz

Echo Nexus is an interactive installation driven by a custom icosahedron-shaped musical instrument. Audiences are invited to engage with these instruments for exploring collective expression of real-time music and visuals, building novel sensory experiences based on collaboration and collective interplay.

Touch – Katrin Enni

Touch by Katrin Enni is an interactive sonic installation inviting visitors to explore the intimate connection between gesture, sound, and invisible materiality. Through hand movements alone—tracked by camera-based sensors—participants sculpt and shape dynamic, electronic soundscapes in real-time. By merging tactile imagination with digital technology, Touch transforms gesture into sonic experience, creating an immersive dialogue between body and sound.

Made possible with support from the National Cultural Endowment of Estonia. 

We are a Pattern – Duncan Figurski

We are a Pattern is an interactive audio installation in which participants are asked to touch a  rotating canvas conveyor belt as it passes on a podium in front of them. The marks left on this canvas by continuous touch will be converted into a live graphic score as the markings pass under a camera which will control a drone and moderate the visual system. This complex instrument is one that can only be played by a group over long periods of sustained interaction.

Control – Emily Francisco

Control is a 61 key reed organ that still functions as a pump organ, but has been modified to split the signals into a five-part, twelve channel audiovisual system controlled by the keyboard. The instrument processes audio and video signals from live broadcast television through antennas and digital tuners. Two octaves of the keyboard (the first and fifth) send video signals from the digital tuners to seven monitors, creating an interference - as the monitors are receiving constant CCTV surveillance feeds. Three octaves of the keyboard (the second, third, and fourth) control audio signals. The second and fourth octaves are sent through effects processors, lowering the pitch of the audio in the second octave and raising the pitch in the fourth. All three octaves are fed from the stereo out DTT901 digital television tuners, split through the reed organ keyboard, and playback through stereo speakers on either side of the reed organ.

Made possible with support from the DCCAH Arts and Humanities Fellowship.

Housework Commons – Jocelyn Ho, Margaret Schedel, Sofy Yuditskaya

Housework Commons is a feminist activist installation that transforms domestic tools into musical instruments using machine learning and embedded sensor technologies, inviting audiences to participate in communal housework as performative sound art. By blending installation and live participation, it reimagines domestic labor—traditionally confined to the private sphere—as a shared act of creativity and community through public engagement with these unassuming quotidian objects. Housework Commons consists of two custom-built digital musical instruments:

Tag Team – Synthador, Roman Martinez

The tag team is the ultimate example of two who are 'connected' in the squared circle.  El Paso Artist Roman Martinez and the mysterious Synthador present Tag Team at Sound Scene 2025.  Two Luchadores stand before you, each ready for you to approach and scream, clap, cheer or even 'trash talk' and your audio is looped and drives real time 8-bit visualization. The retro, lo-fi aesthetic evokes a connection to days gone by."

Workshop/ Installation:

A Thousand Mornings –  Double Yolk Collective: Beccy Abraham, Laura Coe, Alan Kuang, Albert Zhang

Come play with dance and sound! Join Double Yolk Collective for an interactive performance workshop. Team up with a friend to tap into your own electricity, as we turn the ground we stand on into a music making instrument which makes music at the places we touch.

Performances:

An Appeal to Reason – KOKAYI

An Appeal to Reason is a musical composition and sound installation that channels Thomas Mann’s protest against fascism and his commitment to democracy. Blending archival recordings, classical motifs, and contemporary sound design, it offers a layered, spatialized audio experience. The work serves as both a meditation on reason, humanity, and resistance, and a reflection of hip hop’s ethos—creating meaning from limited means. DC-based multidisciplinary artist KOKAYI remixes memory through sound, film, sculpture, and found materials.

Audio Flux Circuit 5: In 3D – Julie Shapiro, John DeLore, Eric Drysdale

Audio Flux celebrates innovative, short-form audio work and bold storytelling. Join us for the debut of “Circuit 05: In 3D,” created in partnership with 3D photography aficionado, Eric Drysdale. Together we’ll listen to fluxworks from around the world, meet some of the producers behind these stories, revel in the “sound of place” and geek out about the magic of 3D – before our eyes, and in our ears.

Below the Surface – Farida Hughes, Matt Keown

Below the Surface is the immersive multimedia collaboration between visual artist Farida Hughes and percussionist Matt Keown, synthesizing Hughes' luminous abstract art and Keown's intricate percussion compositions. Together, the artists construct a dialogue that celebrates the primal forces of nature—creative volcanic activity, the flow of water, the resilience of the earth—as metaphors for the unknowable power of human creativity and connection.

The Power of Sound! Harmony & Dissonance Surround Us – Estephanie Rose, Manuel De La Luz, Iliana Garabyare

The Power of Sound! Harmony and Dissonance Surround Us is an immersive and interactive sonic meditative experience that aims to bring awareness of our relationship to sound, our environment, and ultimately each other. This multi-sensory live soundscape performance will use resonant sound healing and acoustic instruments, as well as analog manipulations, to mimic sounds of the natural world and beyond.  Our focus is to explore how everyone has a constant sonic exchange with their environment - a symbiotic relationship, some in harmony, some dissonant, by taking participants through an immersive sonic journey.

I Resist This – Charlotte Richardson-Deppe, Leo Grierson, Peter Pattengill

I Resist This is a 30-minute performance featuring two dancers activating soft-sculpture wearables scored by an innovative original soundscape. Using movement languages of weight-sharing and improvisation, the pair of performers interface with squishy, body-like sculptures to explore the inherent tension between independence and interdependence.

Kimyan Law Live – Kimyan Law

Kimyan Law is a Congolese-Austrian musician, producer, filmmaker and painter – an interdisciplinary artist which incorporates African instruments, patterns and influences into his music, achieving a rare organic and human quality amongst the cold electronics. Deep explorations into his Congolese roots have led him to create complex mosaics of ancient imagery and sound with modern aesthetics.

With his Live Concert, the songs and their stories transport the listener through colourful sonoric landscapes, timbres and dreams, deep into the world of Kimyan Law. Through drumming, sampling and playing live, the music happens ‘in the moment’, giving the concert a warm and organic quality amongst the often formulaic approaches to performing electronic music.

Made possible with support from the Austrian Cultural Forum.