by alex cruse, University of California, Santa Cruz

0th aubade 

an evolving multimedia work first conceived of as a play for one voice.

This work encounters digitality as philosophy, thinking with its constitutive lacks. Using a Trello task board, the play evaluates stolen time and Silicon Valley’s "co-working" tools for their dramaturgical effects. Dialogue may be rearranged, archived, assigned to a different voice – echoing the arbitrary pointlessness of waged work –  as it questions how different modes of address succeed or fail to generate value, as marketplace temporalities mediate their contexts. Lines are "assigned" to characters in the forms of task cards, which are invisibilized by the platform once completed, hypothetically erasing the play in real time. The work concerns subject formation and deformation via other people's language; the formal and grammatical and corporatized structures of the command. Language is the play's characters: mute speech of productive and mobile avatars, having limited contact with the physical world.

sascha NONEXTINCT_ENSIGN and VERSTECK (sN_E’)

both performed by alex cruse, speak from a zeitgeist swaddled in ineffable vibe, as remixed drainage of our fractured copresence: its tensions, losses, affects, tone, and pain. It takes place, all of the time.

alex cruse is an artist and writer currently studying Film & Digital Media at UCSC. 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 worked at Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco, and in Santa Cruz intermittently programs TILT-SHIFT at Indexical - a screening series on militant filmmakers’ poetics + praxes. Writing, art, and criticism can be found in Social Text, LOGIC Mag, SFMOMA Open Space, SPAM Zine, Post-Crisis Poetics, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, among other places.