Complexity and Coffee

​Join us for an evening of musical and meditation practices centered on free play, deep listening, mindfulness, and creative expression. Musicians and non-musicians alike are invited.

​At the heart of music is complex interrelationship: between the sounds themselves, between listening and performing, between the internal sensation and physical embodiment of the music, between self and others sharing the experience. Music-making can be a vessel for cultivating relationships across multiple levels and a lens for examining relationality itself, starting within ourselves and extending to everything.

​As a means of exploring this, we’ll play musical “games”: participatory exercises with minimal prompts that serve as catalysts for collaborative improvisation. Drawing on free improv music traditions and techniques, the games will focus on personal expression and experimentation, as opposed to technical skill and cultural knowledge. People of all musical skill levels and backgrounds are encouraged to participate. We’ll also explore silent meditation to practice different kinds of listening — both external and internal — as well as deeper engagement with the present moment.

​Come investigate what improvisation and listening reveal about the innate creative potential and musicality within everyone!

About the facilitator:
Ross Hackenmiller is a musician and music facilitator from St. Paul, MN. He studied music and religion at Hamline University, where he conducted an honors project on human interaction and psychology through improvisational musical experiences. Since graduating in 2011, he has organized participatory music-making events in public places, performed in indie rock bands, worked as a church musician, taught guitar lessons, and continued studying musical improvisation techniques.

Ross has facilitated public music-making at events and venues including the St. Paul Saints baseball games, Minnesota State Fair, Northern Spark, Northern Lights.mn Play Day, Grand Old Day, Minneapolis Open Streets, Piazza on the Mall, and the Luminary Loppet winter festival. His passion lies at the intersection of music, creativity, neurology, and spirituality — helping others discover their innate creativity through interactive art and music.

We often talk about “nature” and “nurture” as if they were separate forces. One exists inside us, the other outside. But what if that’s a false divide? What if every living thing is, in a sense, a description of its environment; a co-creation and reflection of the relationships that sustain it? And if that’s true, where does an organism end and its environment begin?

Let’s explore how evolutionary process works through variation, adaptation, and feedback flowing through the whole web of life. To do that, we’ll need to look at how competition and cooperation intertwine and how environments evolve along with their inhabitants. How might this change the way we think about our own learning, growth, and what it means to be participants in an ever evolving world?

This conversation will be free-form, which means it might meander into adjacent topics. No need to prepare or bring anything but your curiosity and an open mind.

In just a few short years, artificial intelligence has moved from a promising research frontier to a powerful global force—reshaping culture, policy, infrastructure, economics, creativity, and daily life in ways we are only beginning to grasp. AI is hyped, feared, celebrated, and misunderstood. And beyond the headlines and predictions, it raises deeper questions about meaning, identity, and what it is to be human in a rapidly shifting world.

Let’s explore AI as a complex phenomenon emerging from—and now profoundly influencing—our entangled civilization. Let’s ask: How might AI reshape our understanding of intelligence? How might AI change our experience of embodiment, meaning, and relationship? What hopes, fears, or metaphors are we projecting onto our machines?

This conversation will be free-form, which means it might meander into adjacent topics. No need to prepare or bring anything but your curiosity and an open mind.