SPAM New Media Festival launches its California edition of its annual festival with performances by interdisciplinary artist Jean Carla Rodea, collaborative duo Abram Stern & Dorothy R. Santos, and new Santa Cruz-based project EPOCH.

Jean Carla Rodea

This workshop invites participants to spend some offline time reflecting on labor in the AI era by drawing and producing a postcard as a piece of asynchronous physical media. Participants will draw a phone, laptop, device, or screenshot that is significant to their work as an artist, technologist, writer, or digital laborer. Drawing serves as a meditation: what labor is contained in our devices? What memories do our digital devices hold? How can we visually represent our labor and memories in our rendering of the device?

This workshop invites participants into collective improvisation, drawing on Kumi Maxson’s work as a performing artist and teacher to explore improvisation's role in political and social change.

Join us for a series of daytime talks with SPAM artists Jean Carla Rodea, Dorothy R. Santos, Abram Stern, and Nathan Corder.

SPAM New Media Festival continues with performances by electronic percussionist Sunken Cages, collaborative duo Rohan Chander & Scott Li, and artist / instrument builder Ava Koohbor.

What is the difference between using the arts in organizing and political art? This workshop muses on dilemmas of working with exploited, politically activated communities in crisis. How do we take the act of filmmaking collaboratively seriously if participants are genuinely so in crisis, their time and labor is at a breaking point—they can’t afford to spend the time to truly co-author a film? What does filmmaking really entail and how do we break it into its fundamental pieces, to make it as agile, scrappy, negotiable and modular, without resorting to “stunt” co-credits or misrepresenting labor and power relations in filmmaking and organizing. By borrowing from a recent project with erotic laborers, massage workers and migrant workers in active organizing and resistance, artist and scholar Diana Mulan Zhu will draw on dialectical behavioral therapy, software engineering, fluxus, and crip practices to guide a workshop on making films on smartphones in her “docufiction” approach, covering costume, set design, cinematography, lighting, editing, performance, graphics and sound.

Join us for a series of daytime talks with SPAM artists Rohan Chander and Ava Koohbor.

What does it cost to think together? Listening, explaining, and trusting take as long as they ever did, but the rest of the world is not waiting. This workshop explores ideas seen through the lens of time scarcity where collaboration becomes privilege. By unpacking the notion of the hurried handoffs via dimensions of labor and time inequalities (who gets to finish a thought? who can afford to be reasonable?), we progressively revive interrupted ideas, in the hopes of understanding whether the most vivid glimmer of a concept can survive an imposed context shift. Can we interrupt interruption itself? We will practice idea reconstitution inspired by arcane memory methods through provocations and group work.

A fun, free, and open to the public monthly get-together for rousing discussions, live demonstrations, impromptu jams, show-and-tells, and all things synth related.

Indexical is pleased to present an evening of music from the Nathan Clevenger Group and composer/improvisor Marc Perez. The Nathan Clevenger Group will be performing new arrangements of pieces from 'Astrolabe' (2025), a suite for large ensemble, as well the debut of a newly composed piece from a developing 'Astrolabe Apocrypha.' Marc Perez performs "Present/Out Of," a new multimedia work exploring the boundaries and relationship between sound, text & community. This piece aims to bring forth the question "how much of yourself can you give in order to be present and active, listening within a space?"

A sign-up based Open Mic night for anyone involved in making electronic music, whatever the style, genre or format - anything from ambient and drone through synth pop, techno to industrial, noise and beyond!

Join us for an intimate artist talk with Chari Smith ahead of their multimedia performance work: Performing Anarchive. The talk will include additional sound and media works installed in the Indexical space, further immersing one into the archive.

Through motion capture, immersive sound, and real-time digital systems, CHARI performs alongside Harriet, a life-scale avatar carrying a living archive of Black cultural memory. Together, they move through fragments of sound, image, and memory, shaping the world around them as the performance unfolds. Performing Anarchive brings body and technology together in a live exploration of memory, movement, and possibility.

Eternities is an intuitive collaboration between bass clarinetist Katie Porter and sound artist Bob Bellerue. Their work is inspired by deep presence, resonant feedback, melodic drone, and overtone magic, in the fluid realm between intention and indeterminacy. For this special event, Katie and Bob present solo works followed by a collaborative performance to close out the evening. 

In a trio formation with some of the core rhythm section players from the record, Max Jaffe, Gavin Gamboa, and Logan Kane reimagine the music from Jaffe's 2025 release, You Want That Too!

Indexical is pleased to present a screening of experimental 16mm films by Paul Clipson, accompanied by a short talk from collaborator John Davis.

Seating is limited. Advance tickets suggested.

Special thanks to John Davis for projection assistance.