Talk

<div>Using contact microphones, electromagnetic pickups, and tactile transducers, attendees will learn techniques for combining these elements with various materials to make their own custom musical instruments. You will leave the workshop with a kit of electronic components that will allow you to continue combining these elements to explore the acoustic properties of the materials around you and build your own unique electro-acoustic voices. The workshop will be presented as a lecture/demonstration followed by a hands-on play session and group improvisation.  </div>

<div>On Friday, February 27, TILT-SHIFT welcomes Yasmine Benabdallah for a screening and discussion of four of her films. These will be accompanied by a screening of Nour Ouyada's <em>VERS LE SOLEIL</em>, followed by a discussion of Benabdallah's political work and creative practice. *** <em>This program aligns with Benabdallah's exhibition "The one with the manes" that will run from February 19th to March 14th, 2026 at the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. For more info visit:</em><a href="https://sesnongalleries.ucsc.edu/exhibition/the-one-with-the-manes/">https://sesnongalleries.ucsc.edu/exhibition/the-one-with-the-manes/</a> </div>

<div>In the first half of this workshop, we'll apply fundamentals of object-oriented programming in JavaScript to live code electronic dance music with Charlie Roberts' Gibber web platform (gibber.cc); we'll sequence drum machines and synthesizers, tune up filters and envelopes, and route signals to effects and effect busses. In the second half of the workshop, we'll learn to synchronize generative visuals to our sounds; we'll combine and light solid geometry, hack together and transform synthesized and external video sources in Hydra, and map custom animations in p5.js. Bring your wi-fi-enabled laptop, your headphones, and your beginner's mind.</div>

<div>Indexical presents the culminating performance project of 2025–26 Artist-in-Residence Thadeus Frazier-Reed: a series of compositions created for his custom-designed Starfield system—an array of small sound-making objects suspended from the ceiling of the performance space.Each object is controllable by the composer in real time, making the installation fully performable and allowing for dynamic exploration of timbre, spatialization, and movement.</div>

<div>Join us for an evening with avant-garde luminary Larry Gottheim. Q&amp;A with guest curator Allen Riley (PhD candidate in Film &amp; Digital Media at  UC Santa Cruz) to follow the program. Co-sponsored by the Santa Cruz Film Festival<action-text-attachment sgid="BAh7CEkiCGdpZAY6BkVUSSI7Z2lkOi8vaW5kZXhpY2FsLWFwcC9BY3RpdmVTdG9yYWdlOjpCbG9iLzg3NT9leHBpcmVzX2luBjsAVEkiDHB1cnBvc2UGOwBUSSIPYXR0YWNoYWJsZQY7AFRJIg9leHBpcmVzX2F0BjsAVDA=--122b44b9e689f856d9d3d6cce4e95b5ddeb1f030" content-type="image/png" url="https://www.indexical.org/rails/active_storage/blobs/redirect/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBBbXNEIiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--519c77fe79639b1b69b1cfbfff9b0e99ac85158c/SCFF-LOGO-EYE-HANDS_25_event.png" filename="SCFF-LOGO-EYE-HANDS_25_event.png" filesize="101859" width="2646" height="400" previewable="true" presentation="gallery"></action-text-attachment> </div>

<div>Experience the forefront of cinematic innovation in <em>Inhabiting the Interval: Avant-Garde and Expanded Shorts</em>, a screening block showcasing internationally honored works where bold narratives and artistry collide. Including <em>Queer Dream Triptych</em> (Matt McKinzie), a festival-acclaimed poetic collage weaving psychedelic visuals and queer lineage—official selection at MIX NYC, Queer City Cinema; <em>Weegee's New York </em>(Eric Weeks), a playful city symphony seen through the lens of a camera-carrying cockapoo; <em>Monument</em> (Jeremy Drummond), honored with Best Avant Garde Film at Mesa International layering Super 8 and video for a meditative encounter with protest and reclaimed monument; and <em>Saturday Night Blues</em> (Jean Coleman), a rhythmic film featuring the Oakland-based acclaimed queer author and poet Brontez Purnell. From lyrical explorations of transformation and memory to meditative reflections on belonging, activism, and creative self-discovery, these shorts offer a rare journey into contemporary avant-garde storytelling. Thursday, Oct 9: Join us after for a Q&amp;A  with Director Kedric Jon Bateman.Friday, Oct 10: Join us after for a Q&amp;A  with Director Natalie Peracchio.<strong>Queer Dream Triptych. </strong>Matt McKinzie, USA, 02:30<strong>Weegee's New York. </strong>Eric Weeks, USA, 08:00<strong>i.a. (inter alia).</strong> Sidney Mandros, Germany, 21:23 <strong>Monument. </strong>Jeremy Drummond, Canada/USA, 17:24<strong>Saturday Night Blues.</strong> Jean Coleman, USA, 02:38 <strong>Travelers. </strong>Kedric Jon Bateman, USA, 11:02<strong>Father Time.</strong> Rodrigo Courtney, Mexico, 03:59 <strong>The Story of The Cricket Queen. </strong>Natalie Peracchio, USA, 03:57Length: 75min </div>

<div>In September, TILT-SHIFT welcomes filmmaker Matte Hewitt for an advanced screening and discussion of <em>Shimmering</em> (2025), and<em> Flying Jewels</em> (2024). These short, experimental documentaries emerge from years of field work and intensive  research into how US military technology, Indigenous knowledge systems, and local ecology come together in the figure of the hummingbird.  </div>

<div>Scholar and curator, Anastasia Chernysheva guides us through the history of biofeedback art from the 1960s to the present and an overview of the main approaches to live representation of biological data (video, sound), and an outline of the possible developments and challenges of this hybrid art-science practice. </div>

<div>As part of the exhibition <em>Several Paths Together</em>, Indexical is pleased to present a solo music performance by Billy Gomberg followed by a post-concert Q&amp;A. Several Paths Together <em>Several Paths Together </em>is a set of ten photographs by San Francisco-based musician-artist Billy Gomberg. Shot on film in and around the Marin Headlands, Point Reyes, and Bolinas, these photographs express the awe-inspiring majesty of Bay Area landscapes—and our own human impositions upon them.  After moving to San Francisco in 2018, Gomberg began hiking around local environs with his son: first as a transplant, and eventually as a resident. These explorations soon moved farther afield to West Marin, and with camera and child in tow, Gomberg began shooting, framing the same vantage points on different days, in different weather.  Whether or not you've traversed these spaces yourself, Gomberg's photos, and the immediacy of their beauty, reveal the West Coast anew. These works were created on the occupied, unceded ancestral homelands of the Me-Wuk (Coast Miwok) and Ramaytush Ohlone peoples. Billy GombergBilly Gomberg lives in San Francisco, California. As a musician, his practice incorporates traditional &amp; modern synthesis, digital treatments, acoustic location recordings and occasional instrumentation. As a visual artist, he uses film photography to document the natural world and its human interface. Commitments to improvisation; exploration of internal and external spaces; and interpersonal relationships as pathways of cultural and emotional exchange guide his work. </div>

<div>Ambiguously oscillating between lecture and performance, this event will showcase the concepts and techniques behind non-linear animation as a medium for exploring fluid states that exist between artist and muse, self and other, past and present, man and woman, humans and technology, etc. Audiences should expect to be disoriented, inspired, and entertained!. </div>

<div>A live show at the intersection of experimental performance, comedy, and interactive gaming.I Seem Agical is a showcase/demo of several new interactive games/apps as well as a look into a few new games that may or may not come out. These games may include a gun you can download onto your phone (and use), a device that can (with 100% accuracy) determine someone's sexuality, a physical game that involves dangling a grand piano by a rope and dropping it on the player below, amongst some potential others. </div>

<div>**<em>All donations for this event will go toward emergency relief for artists and arts workers via the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund.**</em> </div>

<div>Indexical welcomes Em Butler, a Social Documentation MFA student in the Film &amp; Digital Media department at UC Santa Cruz. Butler received a BS in Human Biology at UC San Diego, with a minor in Visual Arts. She is a community organizer, writer, and filmmaker from Long Beach, California whose work struggles through the relationships between land, culture, embodied memory, and anti-imperialist movements. Alongside her work, Em will also screen Tsai Ming-liang's <em>The Skywalk is Gone </em>(2002), a mystery that unfolds against the backdrop of Taiwanese urban development. These will be followed by the 1996 short,<em> Blight</em>, which in the words of director John Smith, "revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition."</div>

<div>A new lecture / film / slideshow that attempts to tell the entire history of North American music in ninety minutes! Mississippi Record label and store founder Eric Isaacson will guide you through this whirlwind presentation of archival film, sound clips and images. Subjects include:</div>

<div> <strong><em>*POSTPONED - Due to unforeseen circumstances this event has been postponed. We're working to reschedule this event and hope to have an update on that as soon as possible.*</em></strong><strong>TILT-SHIFT</strong>, referring to a pair of interactions between a camera lens and the image plane, is a new film series about moving images and politics. TILT-SHIFT invites guest filmmakers to screen their work alongside a film that helped inspire it, and discuss with audiences how their work connects to longer lineages of radical cinema and anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle. </div>

<div>Join us on Saturday, November 2nd for a special event to mark the closing of "Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?," a site-specific installation by <strong>Ann Altstatt</strong>. We will feature a conversation with the artist and special live performance by<strong> Kite Hands Glowing</strong>.Free to attend. Light refreshments will be provided.  </div>

<div>Indexical is pleased to present a solo performance by bassoonist and composer Joy Guidry. The concert will be followed by a conversation with the artist hosted by acclaimed composer and theorist James Gordon Williams, Assistant Professor of Music at UC Santa Cruz. </div>

<div>Join Indexical Artists-in-Residence Sarah Cruse (Yayah) and Thomas Sage Pedersen for a free and open to the public conversation on collective liberation and the concepts behind the Shapes &amp; Sounds of Freedom project. </div>

<div>Blending artist video, porn clips and experimental music, Dirty Looks’ Bradford Nordeen leads a visual lecture exploring the recent re-emergence of the bathhouse in queer culture. From the reissued sex soundtracks of Patrick Cowley and Coil, musicians like Ruth Mascelli and Jake Muir bring techno and vaporwave into the steamroom to ply new forms of embodiment. Videos by Oat Montien spin archival art by Patrick Angus, Alvin Baltrop James Bidgood and Jimmy Wright into their own digital utopias. These emerging artists gape the capacity for the bathhouse to create alternative strategies for pleasure that resound Cowley’s sacred pools while squatting them, revising that pearled white tile with a queer politics of the future. </div>

<div>Ahead of their evening performance, Dreamcrusher presents a screening of Ken Russell's <em>Altered States.</em> </div>

<div>Ahead of her evening performance, Lucy Liyou will share and talk about a collection of various TV programs, experimental video, and films in connection to her work. </div>

<div> <strong><em>Please note that this show is rescheduled from February 15 2024. All tickets booked for the original date remain valid.</em></strong>Thomas Sage Pedersen and Speak for Change presents <em>Cannabis Unveiled - Cannabis in Contemporary US Culture, </em>featuring a conversation with local Santa Cruz cannabis expert Bryce Berryessa and a music performance from vocalist Crista Berryessa. </div>

<div>Ahead of their evening performance, Ian Mugerwa aka Dawuna, presents a screening of Claire Denis’ <em>Beau Travail</em> (ranked among the ten best films of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound Critics Poll) and talks about how the film relates to their artistic practice. </div>

<div> <strong><em>It was recently discovered that some advertising listed the incorrect start times. The correct timing is as follows: Doors at 7pm | Start at 7:30pm. Sorry for the inconvenience and we look forward to seeing you there! </em></strong>Dirty Looks' Bradford Nordeen will lead a visual lecture of images and clips from Cookie Mueller's always fervent and sometimes-fleeting roles in the films of John Waters, through No Wave New York classics and in 1980s art videos. With a like flair for the anecdotal and in the collage spirit of Chloé Griffin's Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, Nordeen will present stolen moments and larger scenes from her diverse body of work in "the blessed profession." Cookie Mueller was a firecracker, a cult figure, a wild child, a writer, a go-go dancer, a mother and a queer icon. A child of suburban 1950s Maryland, she made her name as an actress in John Waters' films, including Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, and then as an art critic for Details magazine and a columnist for the East Village Eye. She was also a writer of hilarious and shockingly wise stories, the ‘cure for a bad party,’ and a maven of New York’s downtown art world. Her writings, especially the collection of autobiographical stories Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black (Semiotext(e), 1990) have inspired and amazed many and gathered a kind of cult following. Cookie lived an independent and wild life, going from Provincetown, where she kept a circle of romantic crack-pots and poets around her, to New York City where she collaborated with No Wave and avant-garde filmmakers such as Amos Poe, Eric Michell and Michel Auder, published her writing, and became a star of the nightlife and art scene. Cookie also lit up the stage at the Performing Garage alongside other NYC luminaries such as Taylor Mead, John Heys, Gary Indiana and Sharon Niesp. Although she died from AIDS in 1989, Cookie has become a counter-culture icon, adored by those who have discovered her work. </div>

<div>Speak for Change presents a live music performance from local music producer, curator, and musician Summer Red followed by a discussion with Thomas Sage Pedersen on the role of music in modern culture.</div>

<div> <strong> 4/24:</strong> <strong>Mark Lomanno: “Modulating Bodies and Intimate Incorporations: Trauma, Improvisation, and Belonging.”</strong> </div>

<div>Examining practices of breathing, listening, and improvisation as modes of radical kinship in critical times, Lomanno asks us – <em>What scales can a musician run if they’re running out of breath? Running for their life?</em> Drawing on Abbey Lincoln’s music and a vast array of Black Feminist writings in music, literature, and sound, Lomanno leads a guided listening of Black American pianists Mulgrew Miller and Bud Powell, as he asks us – <em>when listening to music, what have we missed by listening only to the notes themselves? What else will we hear if we listen for the musicians’—and all our—bodies? </em>Suggesting that these jazz pianists have shared essential insight for manifesting the “Wholly Earth” Lincoln imagines, Lomanno makes a case for Black sound practices as incubators of more sustainable communities.This event will culminate with a collective improvisation by <a href="https://www.indexical.org/events/2023-03-27-weekly-exploring-improvisation-space-with-kumi-maxson">Indexical's Artist in Residence, Kumi Maxson</a>. </div>

<div>Akwasi Papa Abrefah discusses the spontaneity in the development of steelpan in Trinidad and Tobago -- a process that illuminates the extensive histories of resistance and radical joy tied to the instrument's origins, as these creatives clashed with the policing of pan communities and US militarization. Akwasi will also discuss his work in building a community for the music at Stanford University.<action-text-attachment sgid="BAh7CEkiCGdpZAY6BkVUSSI7Z2lkOi8vaW5kZXhpY2FsLWFwcC9BY3RpdmVTdG9yYWdlOjpCbG9iLzU3MD9leHBpcmVzX2luBjsAVEkiDHB1cnBvc2UGOwBUSSIPYXR0YWNoYWJsZQY7AFRJIg9leHBpcmVzX2F0BjsAVDA=--a747d78d6aa997f3c266afae8b424ec04572c8a5" content-type="image/jpeg" url="https://www.indexical.org/rails/active_storage/blobs/redirect/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBBam9DIiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--31c893f910bafd149daa64b1df3db9fee9f3b604/akwasi.jpeg" filename="akwasi.jpeg" filesize="1362788" width="2048" height="1152" previewable="true" presentation="gallery"></action-text-attachment> </div>

<div>DeForrest Brown, Jr. gives a lecture on the theoretical work behind his Friday night (4/21) techno set. </div>

<div> <strong>Anthony R. Green and Gabriel Solis</strong>: <strong>A Conversation</strong> </div>

<div>The music we often call Jazz is a remarkable creation. Exceptionally dense and rich, its journey from a local way of playing popular songs to a genre with global reach was almost instant. The feedback loop between local and global networks has continued to define the music to the present. Jazz scholarship has struggled to make sense of this dynamic. A persistent thread of mostly white jazz studies has particularly taken Jazz’s global breadth as a reason to perform a kind of erasure of its deep relationship to Black aesthetics, and more specifically to African American arts communities. This talk offers a polemic, against erasure, but also a historiography, aiming to see the music’s global life not as something in a paradoxical relationship to the particularity of musical blackness, but rather as in a congruent relationship with it.</div>

<div>Carolyn Jean Martin and Aaron Samuel Mulenga present artistic work and scholarship on articulations of Blackness in the Western visual field. </div>

<div>Join us for an artist talk and Q&amp;A with artist Paul Walde, facilitated by Landscape &amp; Life curator Gabriel Saloman Mindel. </div>

<p>Unseen California engages the public land of California as an outdoor artist studio and classroom laboratory by inviting artists to collaborate in research and create site specific art. In its inaugural cohort, Unseen California aims to “see” (by means of visualization and acknowledgement) the multivalent histories that compose the California landscape. This includes indigenous stewardship and regenerative practices – on ceded and unceded land – and the role of settler colonialism and imperialism in construction of these histories. The project will be represented here by artists and organizers Karolina Karlic, Aspen Mays, and Mercedes Dorame.</p>

<p>One of the leading curatorial platforms for contemporary field recording practices, Touch has spent the last 40 years releasing work exploring the sounds hidden in hard-to-reach places. Releases include Norwegian artist Jana Winderen’s recordings of creatures beneath the arctic ice, field recordist Chris Watson’s recordings of multiple layers of the Namib Desert, and many others. Touch will be represented by artists Patrick Shiroishi and Bana Haffar.</p>

<p>Indexical’s Landscape &amp; Life Speaker Series continues with a panel featuring artist Louise Leong; poet, artist and abolitionist Tim Young; artist Aja Bond; and farmer Kellee Matsushita-Tseng. </p>

<p>Adrian Drummond-Cole is an interdisciplinary environmental historian and doctoral candidate in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He researches the science, politics, and cultures of water management in California’s Central Valley, focusing on settler social movements for swampland reclamation and agricultural irrigation. Adrian teaches courses on environmental history, media studies, and human geography.</p>

<div>The Landscape Thinking Group is comprised of UCSC Visual Studies PhD Candidates whose work interrogates landscape as it relates to race, politics and power in regions around the globe. For this event, the Landscape Thinking Group will be facilitating a “Bioregional Quiz” and discussion. Participants will meet at Indexical and then migrate to an outdoor location. Wear clothing appropriate for gathering outside. </div>