Liquid Architecture

The object of the ellipse within science fiction offers numerous ways to reimagine temporarily outside of the confines of linear progress. In part two of ‘Ellipses: Returning to Time Knots and Techno Utopias’ we travel back to the techno-utopian ideas of the dot com boom of the early 1990s to explore the now fraught potential of constructions of digital space and generative music, and the hope that technological advancement could bring society closer to utopia.

Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper from MSHR talk through the influence of science fiction; using the webpage as an artistic platform; and the construction and interaction with generative systems.

MSHR have created Orbit Instantiator, an epic and other-worldly hyperlink labyrinth where the reader can navigate sixteen rooms. Each room glimpses into an unknown world that fuses computer-generated music and digital sculpture together, and is responsive, morphing and shifting as the reader explores the webpage.

MSHR is an art collective that builds and explores sculptural electronic systems. Their practice is a self-transforming entity with its outputs patched into its inputs, expressing its form through interactive installations, virtual environments and live improvisations. MSHR was established in 2011 in Portland, Oregon by Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper. Their name is a modular acronym, designed to hold varied ideas over time.

https://disclaimer.org.au/contents/ellipses-br-returning-to-time-knots-br-and-techno-utopias/orbit-instantiator

Image by MSHR.

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

The object of the ellipse within science fiction offers numerous ways to reimagine temporarily outside of the confines of linear progress. In part two of ‘Ellipses: Returning to Time Knots and Techno Utopias’ we travel back to the techno-utopian ideas of the dot com boom of the early 1990s to explore the now fraught potential of constructions of digital space and generative music, and the hope that technological advancement could bring society closer to utopia.

Coco Klockner talks through the permeation of finance into life; how media has changed how we present in the world; and the use of science fiction to communicate technology politics. Klockner’s playful and speculative short story and accompanying sonic work ‘Short Ladder’, follows protagonist Cat’s rollercoaster experience in the latest development in securities trading: Personal Initial Public Offering, in which investors buy shares in her.

Coco Klockner is an artist and writer living in New York City. They are the author of the book K-Y (Genderfail, 2019) and have published writing with Montez Press, Real Life Magazine, Spike Art Magazine, and Burnaway.

https://disclaimer.org.au/contents/ellipses-br-returning-to-time-knots-br-and-techno-utopias/short-ladder

Image by Michelle Uckotter.

‘Girl Playing in Attic 2’ (2021)

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

Meta-Phoneme. High-Flyers hosting a glossification. Neverything.

Hexed conditioning, Typographic shatters on shhhhhh. Stink of a Mega-Mix.

Champagne on bow. Grand Stalemates. Tell-Drill

Gulping a drip-feel lottery. Preciousness or cavity. Hardly-edging Soft points.

Repeat polite, encore ahistorical. In/formation politics. Flexing Megaplexxx

Listen in to Mono-Poly with a mix featuring sounds and readings from this year’s events. Mono-Poly is Liquid Architecture’s monthly performance program taking place on the first Thursday of each month, curated by Debris Facility.

This mix features live performances from Nina Buchanan, Nico Niquo, Ender Başkan, Nick Ashwood, Daniel Pini, Blood of Pomegranate, Subject Delta, Baby Mode, Abbra Kotlarczyk, Chloë Sobek, Whelk, Elena Gomez and Hamish Upton.

The final Mono-Poly of 2022 will take place this Friday, December 9. Spread across Collingwood Yards at Bus Projects, Centre for Projection Art, Composite, Liquid Architecture, Music Market and West Space. 12+ Artists offer up Exhibitions, Installations, Screenings, Performances, Lectures, Voices, and Music. Find more information at the link in our show notes.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/mega-phone-mono-poly

Mega-Phone Mono-Poly

09 December 2022

Collingwood Yards, Wurundjeri Country

Image by Clare Steele.

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

Selfless selves, linked Is, and not-Is. -I is the third in a series of twelve annual 12-hour events taking place on December 12, 2022. Each year the event moves through each word of the 12-word phrase 'you and I are water earth fire air of life and death' and activates the word of the year in a myriad of ways. 

Christof Migone talks through the origins of his curatorial project You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death; the contributions to this year's theme of I; and the use of time and mathematics to create structure within artistic practice.

Christof Migone is an artist, teacher, curator, and writer often working with language, voice, bodies, performance, intimacy, complicity, and endurance.

Liquid Architecture will present 'Ego Trip' by Machine Listening for this year's instalment of 'You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death'. The video work was made following the announcement of Ego4d from Facebook AI in 2021. Ego4D is a dataset, an international research network coordinated by Meta, and a set of machine learning challenges to competitively answer the questions: “what did I do?”, “what am I doing now?”, and “what will I do next?” through the eyes and ears of an augmented human body. ‘Ego Trip’ extracts moments from an Ego4D promotional video and relentlessly recomposes them into new variations of their slogan-question, What if AI could understand your world through your eyes?

Machine Listening is an investigation and experiment in collective learning instigated by Sean Dockray, James Parker, and Joel Stern. The project takes numerous forms including collaborative research, resource sharing, curation, publishing and artistic production.

https://youandiarewaterearthfireairoflifeanddeath.com/project/i-2022

You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death

12 December 2022

Online

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

Folk, Noise, Electronics, Improvisation – how can radical music help us manifest new possibilities for thinking and imagine new ways of organising community through ritual behaviours, actions and languages?

Rully and Wukir of Senyawa talk through the stories, languages and sounds explored through their collaboration; the power of music performance and distribution to form social connection; and what to expect from their upcoming shows for Liquid Architecture and Soft Centre.

Senyawa are a seminal outfit in Indonesia’s thriving avant-garde music scene having navigated unexplored musical terrain for more than a decade. The duo have developed a hybrid sound, that weaves the tribal and primitive with industrial timbres and folkloric storytelling. Their sound is comprised of Rully Shabara’s deft extended vocal explorations punctuating the frenetic sounds of Wukir Suryadi’s self-built instrumentation. During the pandemic, Senyawa released the new album 'Alkisah' with over 40 labels around the world.

Soft Centre, Eora / Sydney: https://www.softcentre.com.au/event-program/opening-concert

Miscellania, Naarm / Melbourne: https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/senyawa-senyawa-with-support-from-jasmin-wing-yin-leung

Ritual Community Music

27 November 2022

Miscellania, Melbourne

Presented by Liquid Architecture

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

Folk, Noise, Electronics, Improvisation – how can radical music help us manifest new possibilities for thinking and imagine new ways of organising community through ritual behaviours, actions and languages?

Jasmin Wing-Lin Leung talks through her connection with the Erhu; her compositional practice of working with room resonance; and what to expect from her upcoming performance for Liquid Architecture’s Ritual Community Music series.

Jasmin Wing-Yin Leung works with the Erhu within composition, improvisation and installation settings. She is interested in the sonic possibilities of resonance, intonation, hauntings and the environment.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/senyawa-senyawa-with-support-from-jasmin-wing-yin-leung

Ritual Community Music

27 November 2022

Miscellania, Melbourne

Presented by Liquid Architecture

Photo: Caleb College.

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

In "Musical Vitalities", Holly Watkins describes the life of music - tenuous, metaphorical, contingent and mortal - as the cross-modal interpretation of sounds. Sounds are ambiguous, they alert us to dangers and lures, both animate and inanimate. “Music retains that ambiguity; music is the art of possibly animate things”.

Artist and writer Tessa Laird and curator Xenia Benivolski discuss how echo-location can act as metaphor, word play, and sonic stimulus; the double-sided notion of anthropomorphism; and interspecies cultures and resonance.


Tessa Laird’s essay 'Locating Echoes' attempts to bridge the existential void that separates us from bats. It is presented alongside video works by the artist and editor of our journal Disclaimer Liang Luscombe, and audio compositions created using bat samples by our editorial associate and former artistic director Joel Stern.

Co-commissioned by Liquid Architecture and E-Flux ‘Locating Echoes’ was developed for the latest chapter of You Can’t Trust Music (YCTM), a research project on sound and music, curated by Xenia Benivolski. The piece is featured in Chapter 3 of You Can’t Trust Music – ‘The Art of Possibly Animate Things' – exploring the convergence between danger, safety, community, prayer and the flow of information through und erwater cables, generations, skies, animals and sediments;  'Listening to music, we continuously experiment with being other.' (Holly Watkins, 1972).

https://yctm.e-flux.com/the-art-of-possibly-animate-things

Image: Liang Luscombe.

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

The object of the ellipse within science fiction offers numerous ways to reimagine temporarily outside of the confines of linear progress. Ellipses: Part One: Time Knots encourages us to imagine a more blended temporarily and perhaps to even actualise new times.

Daniel Jenatsch talks through the expansion of his universe ‘The Close World’; the affects of working with the program GPT-3 to generate dialogue; and his relationship to science fiction.

Daniel Jenatsch combines hyper-detailed soundscapes, music and video to create multimedia documentaries, installations, radio pieces, and performances. Reaching back into the research of a now little known Professor William A. (Bill) Martin, a computer scientist who worked on early natural language processing at MIT in the 1970s called OWL (One World Language), Daniel Jenatsch has expanded his universe of The Close World. OWL was based on the philosopher Wittgenstein’s theory of knowledge that the meaning of any concept in language is linked to the totality of all other concepts. A singular and mysterious figure in computer programming, Jenatsch reformulates some of Martin’s methods, presenting a creative fiction about Martin as a traveller between this world and the establishment of OWL, and The Close World. Written in collaboration with an AI trained by Jenatsch, the methods of production of this work become a form of time travel, blurring artistic, scientific, artificial and historical voices.

https://disclaimer.org.au/contents/ellipses-br-returning-to-time-knots-br-and-techno-utopias/daniel-jenatsch

Image: Daniel Jenatsch

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

Presented in homage to Lis Rhodes pioneering optical sound and film installation, Light Music (1975), Liquid Architecture presented a series of live experimental sound and cinema performances at ACMI on Saturday October 15th.

Sally Golding talks through her work Intra Protocol; the techniques of expanding cinema in space and media; and the community experiment in giving agency over to the audience.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/liquid-architecture-x-light

Liquid Architecture x Light: Sally Golding, Bonnie Mercer, amby downs, and Carmen-Sibha Keiso

15 October 2022

ACMI, Melbourne

Presented by Liquid Architecture and ACMI

Image: Tony Zara

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

TERRA: Memory & Soil is a collaboration between Victoria Pham and Joel Spring that transforms West Space gallery into an immersive garden by combining sound, biological-sculpture, architecture and projection. The project interrogates how we remember our past landscapes, bringing vastly different insights into notions of the built environment, history and legacies of colonialism.

Archeologist and composer Victoria Pham talks through the elements that make up TERRA; the practice of archeo-acoustics; and the mission of placing indigenous knowledge at the centre of knowledge production, cultural exchange and story-telling.

Victoria Pham is an Australian installation artist, composer, archaeologist and evolutionary biologist. She is a current PhD candidate for Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge where she seeks to expand her interdisciplinary work into a broader exploration of acoustic perception as a basis into modes of bio-acoustic material development and construction. Her artistic and musical work is driven by explorations into the sonic connections between second-hand memory, examining modes of decolonisation, communal story-telling, intertwining electronic sound with acoustic instrumentation, and ecological expressions of construction

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/victoria-pham-and-joel-spring-terra

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/mono-poly-terra-october

TERRA: Mono-Poly-October

13 October 2022

West Space and Collingwood Yards

Presented by Liquid Architecture, West Space and Create Yarra

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/