On the night of July 16, 2006, Mazen Kerbaj stood on a balcony in Beirut as Israeli Air Force bombs fell in the distance. He picked up his trumpet and played along to the ominous pops, some louder than others. Starry Night (2006), the composition that resulted, asks the unanswerable question: What is the value of an aesthetic response to a political situation? Aura Satz’s film Preemptive Listening (Part 1: The Fork in the Road) (2018) dwells in the same conceptual and acoustic space. This spare work, which beyond a few close-up glimpses of a light bulb depicts only a dark void punctuated by pulses of light, obscures its sources to the point of unrecognizability: actor and activist Khalid Abdalla, whose voice we hear, never identifies the emergency sirens he describes occurring in Egypt during the Arab Spring; an alarm light rotates according to the cadence of his speech; and Kerbaj again plays his trumpet, this time as a low drone imitating the sound of a siren. Satz turns a moment of questioning into reckoning, when one is called to attention by a distant siren, but not yet certain how to act. Played on a loop in the gallery’s back …