Audio Foundation presents the outstanding Australian arts collective Machine Listening - Sean Dockray, James Parker, and Joel Stern.
Environmentality by Machine Listening
What kind of planet would the planetisation of machine listening make? Microphones and loudspeakers are being laced through the biosphere. AI systems monitor forests, oceans, reefs and skies, all in the name of a cybernetic ecology. But who governs this listening infrastructure? Who is heard, and what does it even mean to be heard? What is unheard?
In this lecture-performance presented in response to their installation Environments 12, Machine Listening — James Parker, Joel Stern and Sean Dockray — bring together ideas from Parker's text The Planetization of Machine Listeningand the collective's audiovisual instrument Konvolute, a tool for composing with cut-up video and environmental datasets in real time. The three artists will critically feed the essay’s argument back through performance and media improvisation to complicate it, testing the lecture’s claims against the grain of the material, letting the software push back, introduce noise, and open questions the words alone cannot quite hold.
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Machine Listening is a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation, founded in 2020 by Sean Dockray, James Parker, and Joel Stern in order to subject automated systems to political and aesthetic scrutiny. The collective works across writing, installation, performance, music, software, curation, pedagogy, and radio.
https://machinelistening.exposed/
James Parker is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School, who works across legal scholarship, art criticism, curation, and production. He is an Associate Investigator with ADM+S, a former ARC DECRA fellow, former visiting fellow at the Program for Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School for Government, and sits on the advisory board of Earshot, an NGO specialising in audio forensics.
Joel Stern is an artist, curator, and researcher. His work explores sound and listening as cultural, political, and technical practices shaping contemporary life. He is a Research Fellow at RMIT’s School of Media and Communication and was Artistic Director of Liquid Architecture from 2013 to 2022.
Sean Dockray is an artist and writer whose work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligences and the algorithmic web. He is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Monash University, a founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and AAAARG.ORG.
