Quick Take
Santa Cruz-based nonprofit Indexical is devoted to presenting experimental music and performance art to audiences curious for something outside the mainstream. On Friday, Indexical hosts a screening of the late David Lynch's film "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me."
As branding goes, “Indexical” is pretty savvy. It’s a term that sounds plausibly like a word in English, though you’ve almost certainly never used it in a sentence and could probably not, if cornered, tell anyone what it means. (I mean, had you ever heard of “google” before Google?)
For the record, “indexical” refers to any word or expression whose meaning is completely dependent on the context in which it is used. That makes it ideal for the name of an organization interested in experimental art, which is all about the relationship between meaning and content.
In Santa Cruz, however, the word is used in sentences much more than in other communities, thanks to Indexical, the local nonprofit based at the Tannery Arts Center devoted to presenting works of experimental art.
On Friday, Indexical will host a tribute to the film auteur David Lynch, who died Jan. 15. That an event centered on Lynch — the eccentric genius behind such unforgettably weird films as “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” — represents a step toward the mainstream for Indexical tells you something about where the organization’s interests lie.
The Friday event will feature a screening of Lynch’s 1992 film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” followed by a live conversation between UC Santa Cruz digital media Ph.D. candidate Allen Riley and Santa Cruzan Douglas Murray, a longtime sound engineer who worked as supervising sound editor on “Fire Walk With Me.”
The Lynch screening, a donation-only fundraiser for Los Angeles fire relief, is likely to attract an audience not familiar with what Indexical has been doing in Santa Cruz for the past decade. More typical is last Friday’s performance of Bay Area musician Gregg Kowalsky, billed as “minimalism and maximalism in one performance,” and the upcoming Feb. 6 performance of Mayuko Hino, aka “The Queen of Japanese Noise.”
Michael Flora is Indexical’s executive director, replacing the group’s founder, Andrew Smith, in 2023. “Historically,” Flora said, “we were founded as a composers’ collective. So we tend to be known in music circles. But I think Indexical has always been kind of interested in what artists are doing in multiple disciplines.”
Music is much of what Indexical presents at its small space at the Tannery (think 40-50 people). But it also features lots of films, visual art installations, dance/movement and other forms of art. In fact, the boundary-blurring is very much part of the point of the organization, said Flora.
“We want to be a place for risk taking for artists. I think a lot of times what we do is very challenging for an audience, and it certainly isn’t going to appeal to everyone,” he said. “But I think having a place like Indexical in Santa Cruz is very important because it becomes a place that people can go to stumble across something and say, ‘Wow, I don’t know what that was, but I really want to look into it more.’”
Indexical presents about four to five shows a month featuring performers and artists from Santa Cruz, the Bay Area and beyond, as well as an electronic music open-mic event and a monthly meetup of the Santa Cruz Synth Cooperative, with discussions on electronic music, demos and jams, notices of which go out to a mailing list of 2,000 people. That potential audience, said Flora, goes well beyond Santa Cruz to regional, national and even international fans.
“When you’re working within the artistic ecosystem in an experimental context,” he said, “you automatically become part of this thing that is bigger than any sort of regional focus. So we have a lot of artists [and fans] contacting us from New York and places all over the world.”
A screening of David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” followed by a live interview with the film’s sound editor Douglas Murray, takes place Friday at 7 p.m. at Indexical’s performance space at the Tannery Arts Center. Suggested donation is $5 to $50, and all donations will go toward emergency relief for artists and arts workers in Los Angeles through the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund.
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