Liquid Architecture

Investigating listening practices and extractive industries in Australia, Quandamooka artist Megan Cope’s ‘Untitled (Death Song)’ comprises of sound sculptures constructed from discarded mining and industrial equipment accompanied by a soundtrack made in collaboration with musician and instrument builder Isha Ram Das. It takes its first note from the haunting cries of the yellow-eyed Bush Stone-curlew, an endangered species within New South Wales known for its distinctive call, a ghost-like “weer-lo” sound.

https://disclaimer.org.au/contents/unsettling-scores/untitled-death-song

Image: Saul Steed

Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HzFchHyYk-QGFaFpOYVCFCyskKMSPb8wY_wqUuF-WC8/edit?usp=sharing

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.

Our devices are listening to us. Previous generations of audio-technology transmitted, recorded or manipulated sound. Today our digital voice assistants, smart speakers and a growing range of related technologies are increasingly able to analyse and respond to it as well. Scientists and engineers increasingly refer to this as “machine listening”, though the first widespread use of the term was in computer music. Machine listening is much more than just a new scientific discipline or vein of technical innovation however. It is also an emergent field of knowledge-power, of data extraction and colonialism, of capital accumulation, automation and control. It demands critical and artistic attention.

Leading off from Shannon Mattern’s essay “Urban Auscultation; or, Perceiving the Action of the Heart”, which addresses machine listening in the pandemic, artist Sean Dockray, legal scholar James Parker, and curator Joel Stern discuss with Shannon the stethoscope, the decibel and other histories of machine listening, along with its epistemic and political dimensions and artistic deployments.

https://machinelistening.exposed/curriculum/

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.

Our devices are listening to us. Previous generations of audio-technology transmitted, recorded or manipulated sound. Today our digital voice assistants, smart speakers and a growing range of related technologies are increasingly able to analyse and respond to it as well. Scientists and engineers increasingly refer to this as “machine listening”, though the first widespread use of the term was in computer music. Machine listening is much more than just a new scientific discipline or vein of technical innovation however. It is also an emergent field of knowledge-power, of data extraction and colonialism, of capital accumulation, automation and control. It demands critical and artistic attention.

André Dao talks to artist Sean Dockray, legal scholar James Parker, and curator Joel Stern about UN Global Pulse, the UN’s big data initiative, and in particular one program which “uses machine Learning to analyse radio content in Uganda”. They discuss the increasing entanglements of big tech, the UN and human rights discourse more broadly, as well as an emergent “right to be counted”.

https://machinelistening.exposed/curriculum/

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.

Staged as part of the NTU CCA Singapore’s recurring Free Jazz exhibition program, this iteration of Machine Listening focuses on the complex and evolving dialectic between improvisation and control, framed via a detour into the experimental computer music laboratories of the 1980s and 1990s where the term ‘machine listening’ first begins to circulate. Here we hear work from Jessica Feldman, Mattin, and Lee Gamble.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/machine-listening-improvisation-and-control

Machine Listening

13 March 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZvK8atIlnA&ab_channel=LiquidArchitecture

Presented by Liquid Architecture, NTU, UnSound, Melbourne University and ANU

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.

Thinking and listening to place emerges as a thematic of Where and how to gather - a collection of texts published on Disclaimer and edited by Josten Myburgh. These works consider technology and humanity as being in the world, rather than as tacet mediators or observers of it, with the writing investigating the processes by which meditation is obscured, or how presence is made difficult.

Michael Terren and Joee Mejias talk through the ideas and processes behind their respective pieces, ‘The Hegemony of the DAW’ and ‘1111 Typhoon’.

https://disclaimer.org.au/contents/where-and-how-to-gather

Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13HIVopOH65T9IsmG2gs4lE0kkzNLjME6mvb09nfLM0U/edit?usp=sharing

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.

Thinking and listening to place emerges as a thematic of 'Where and How to Gather' - a collection of texts published on Disclaimer and edited by Josten Myburgh. These works consider technology and humanity as being in the world, rather than as tacet mediators or observers of it, with the writing investigating the processes by which meditation is obscured, or how presence is made difficult.

Aisyah Aaqil Sumito and Noémie Cecilia Huttner-Koros talk through the ideas and processes behind their respective pieces, ‘The sound of my own voice butchering transliterated quaranic arabic’ and ‘What are the things that climate can’t change’.

https://disclaimer.org.au/contents/where-and-how-to-gather

Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jBAg43ETMuNwIBfPKxNhIPdbKBih2kCptzcuCbqLGc0/edit?usp=sharing

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.

Mark Andrejevic’s recent book Automated Media considers the politics of automation through the “cascading logics” of pre-emption, operationalism, and “framelessness”. Together with artist Sean Dockray, legal scholar James Parker, and curator Joel Stern, Mark talks through some of these ideas, along with the limits of “surveillance capitalism” as an analytic frame, “touchlessness” in the time of Covid, “operational listening”, what automation is doing to subjectivity… and how all this relates to reality TV.

https://machinelistening.exposed/curriculum/

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.

Angie Abdilla talks to artist Sean Dockray, legal scholar James Parker, and curator Joel Stern about Old Ways, New, the Indigenous owned and led social enterprise she founded, based on Gadigal land in Redfern, Sydney. We discuss Decolonising the Digital, Country Centered Design, a methodology which applies Indigenous design principles to the development of technologies for places, spaces and experiences, and how this contrasts with the ‘placelessness’ on which so many machine learning/listening systems are based.

https://machinelistening.exposed/curriculum/

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.

Armour Group are experimental, atmospheric and conceptual, their music rooted in the traditions of the power electronics/death industrial genre. Through their use of extreme minimal electronics accented by samples drawn from cult cinema, broadly referencing serial killings, murder, disaster, misanthropy, immoral acts, relationships, love and betrayal, they aim beyond brutality to incite feelings of euphoria and affirmation, as well as evoking the impending demise of our current culture and natural surroundings.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/puce-mary-melbourne

Ritual Community Music

The Tote, Melbourne

21 August 2016

Presented by Liquid Architecture, Audio Foundation and The Tote

Image: Lloyd Honeybrook

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.

As Puce Mary, the Danish artist Frederikke Hoffmeier tests the established limits of noise music through sustained experimentation and risk driven by emotive gusto. Puce Mary’s music is harsh, but its aggression is necessary. Her performances are easy to be dragged into but brutally hard to get out of. The underhand of control as censurable nurture—this dialectic is a perennial tonic in sound. Dominance against submission. Artist against audience. Both take turns dealing blows.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/puce-mary-melbourne

Ritual Community Music

The Tote, Melbourne

21 August 2016

Presented by Liquid Architecture, Audio Foundation and The Tote

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.