two chairs on the tonal center

Indexical is pleased to present two chairs on the tonal center, a new project by alex cruse.

Right, my son! This good thing is numbered by …“ [3 lines missing]

—Hermes Trismegistus, The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth

talking like thoughts. can we get closer than sleep? go to the door. open the door. what’s a door? as if a windy mirror could turn its pages.

this exhibition explores phenomena of vocality and echoes of the voice’s withdrawal: moirology and keening, acousmatic listening and antenatal aurality, apophatic media and pre-Socratic silence. some people experience spontaneous otoacoustic emissions, generated by the cochlea. HERE, or in any other space, the ear emits tone continuously, without an external stimulus at all; this is in the exhibition, too.

two chairs on the tonal center: sound as a product of the act of sounding, "that which is sounded”; what is left over when that illusion of difference is subtracted. the hard thing is to bring out all the voices. the hard thing is to hear them all at once.

alex cruse is an interdisciplinary artist and writer currently based in Santa Cruz. cruse is the author of CONTRAVERSE (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017); zero energy experimental pile (Compline, 2020); and solo for world system (Antiphony Press, forthcoming 2028). Since 2015, cruse has performed with Kevin CK Lo as multimedia performance experiment DROUGHT SPA. cruse is the curator of Indexical’s TILT-SHIFT, a film series engaging lineages of radical cinema and anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle.