Event/s
Bookclub: Eavesdropping Wellington
Thu, 07. Nov 2019
Pip Adam and the City Gallery Book Club return with a reading list inspired by Eavesdropping. Panellists: Brannavan Gnanalingam (novelist and lawyer), Sue Orr (fiction writer and former journalist), and David Long (musician, composer and producer). They will be discussing:
Catherine Chidgey, The Beat of the Pendulum: A Found Novel
Italo Calvino, A King Listens (from the collection Under the Jaguar Sun)
Eavesdropping: A Reader, edited by James Parker and Joel Stern
Behrouz Boochani, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison.
Written responses from the following:
Catherine Robertson
Catherine Robertson’s six novels have all been number 1 New Zealand bestsellers. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. Catherine reviews for the NZ Listener, and is a regular guest on RNZ’s The Panel, and Jesse Mulligan’s Book Critic slot. She is on the board of Verb Wellington and on the Book Awards Trust. Catherine’s latest novel is What You Wish For (2019, Penguin Random House).
Ruby Solley
Ruby Solly is a Kai Tahu writer, musician and music therapist. She has been published in journals such as Landfall, Oscen, Minarets, and Starling amongst others. She has recently written her first short film, ‘Super Special’ which has been released by Someday Stories. Ruby will be reading and performing at Litcrawl as part of ‘The Savage Eye’ and ‘Purākau’.
Nikki-Lee Birdsey
Nikki-Lee Birdsey was born in Piha. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA from New York University. She has over 30 publications of poetry and prose in the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, and she is currently a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her first book Night As Day was published by VUP in 2019 and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the U.S.
Annaleese Jochems
Annaleese Jochems grew up in Northland, and works at Book Hound in Newtown. She won the Hubert Church Best First Book award for her novel Baby.
EAVESDROPPING is an
ongoing investigation between Liquid Architecture and Melbourne Law School.
When:
Sat, 17. Aug–
Sun, 17. Nov
2019
The earliest references to eavesdropping are found in law books. According to William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769), ‘eavesdroppers, or such as listen under walls or windows, or the eaves of a house, to hearken after discourse, and thereupon to frame slanderous and mischievous tales, are a common nuisance and presentable at the court-leet’. Today, however, eavesdropping is not only legal, it’s ubiquitous—unavoidable. What was once a minor public-order offence has become one of the key political and legal problems of our time, as the Snowden revelations made clear.
Eavesdropping addresses the capture and control of our sonic world by state and corporate interests, alongside strategies of resistance. For the curators, James Parker (Melbourne Law School) and Joel Stern (Liquid Architecture), eavesdropping isn’t necessarily malicious. We cannot help but hear too much, more than we mean to. Eavesdropping is a condition of social life. And the question is not whether to eavesdrop, therefore, but how.
Much of the work is expressly political. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, based in London and Beirut, considers the oppressive regime of silence enforced in a Syrian prison, the use of accent tests to deny Somalians refugee status, and the analysis of audio-ballistic evidence that led to an Israeli soldier being tried for manslaughter. Works also engage activist practices of ‘listening back’. The Manus Recording Project Collective—a group of men detained by Australia on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea—made recordings daily for the show, offering a sonic window into their situation and prompting us to consider our place as earwitnesses.
The show addresses what can and can’t be heard. Susan Schuppli, from the London group Forensic Architecture, considers a notorious gap in Oval Office audio-tape records during the Nixon presidency, suggesting that lack of evidence could be evidence of something. Sydney-based Wiradjuri artist Joel Spring presents recordings of conversations with his mother—a health worker, activist and academic—about a disease that causes hearing loss in Aboriginal children. For his video, Hong Kong artist Samson Young has singers suppress their vocals, so we only hear the incidental sounds their bodies produce, their breathing, the rattling of their scores.
Technology reigns. Melbourne artist Sean Dockray stages a philosophical dialogue between an Amazon Echo, a Google Home Assistant, and an Apple Homepod on the moral and political implications of networked machine listening. Meanwhile, at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), Fayen d’Evie and Jen Bervin (with Bryan Phillips and Andy Slater) research ‘cosmic eavesdropping’, mixing a SETI radio telescope feed with field recordings and accounts of individuals dedicated to listening for extraterrestrial signals.
City Gallery
Contents
"Quanta sit in huius Theatre Echaei structura opinionum varietas, quanta Authoru dissensio, explicari vix potest: cum nullus sere ex ijs, qui in Vitruuium commentatisunt, illud rito se intellexisse ostendat."Fayen d’Evie and Jen Bervin with Bryan Phillips and Andy SlaterWORK: Cosmic Static
"Kinaesthetic, ultrasonic stories. Grote Reber, who built a parabolic antenna in 1937 in his Chicago backyard to try to listen to signals from outer space, and later moved to Tasmania, where he built an array in the backyard of a sheep grazing property, and for a decade was the world’s only radio astronomer. The operational staff who monitor and maintain the array of small diameter radio telescopes at the SETI Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, California, listening for anomalous stellar and interstellar signals."Joel SpringLawrence Abu HamdanWORKS: Rubber Coated Steel; Saydnaya (The Missing 19DB); Conflicted Phenomes
"I despise anyone who says that art is about asking questions, and not providing answers. You hear that pretty much every day in our profession. Artists who repeat this statement think of this as a radical act. But what if art's radicality is actually about art being an engine for truth production? I'm not talking about the same forms of truth production in science or law, since science is totally different to law and each represents two different models for telling the truth. In forensics, science and law meet in some weird space. In art, you can borrow from the ways that science and law tell the truth in order to come up with the means by which art can also speak it."Manus Recording Project Collective: Farhad Bandesh, Farhad Rahmati, Samad Abdul, Shamindan Kanapathi, Thanush Selvraj, Yasin Abdallah, Abdul Aziz Muhamat, Behrouz Boochani, Kazem Kazemi, Michael Green, André Dao, Jon TjhiaWORKS: how are you today and where are you today
"Speaking on a smuggled phone from inside the Australian-run immigration detention centre on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, Abdul Aziz Muhamat related an anecdote about his day. He'd been standing near the gate when a security guard had called someone's name three or four times. The man was standing nearby but he didn't reply. Aziz told the guard to call his ID number instead - the man responded immediately. 'Look, man, no one is pretending here. Why should he pretend?' Aziz told the guard. 'We forgot our names.'"Samson YoungWORK: Muted Situation #5: Muted Chorus
"John Cage's project has failed Asia. The institutions of music continue to neglect and negate Asian composers. Composers outside the West are invisible in their own concert halls... We must begin by confronting the very language with which we describe the auditory and the act of composition. What does it mean to "orchestrate" and to "compose"? Could one orchestrate and compose without reproducing the power structures that are implicit in these terminologies?"Sean Dockray"There are many conversations that happen on social media that are worth archiving and re-presenting outside of the perpetual present of those platforms. The Facebook timeline is like a broken toilet, constantly flushing. The collective knowledge generated within a status updates that generates hundreds of comments or a particularly active and focused group needs to be rescued from the planned forgetfulness of social media."Susan SchuppliWORKS: The Missing 18 1/2 Minutes; Listening to Answering Machines
"The material witness — an entity (object or unit) whose physical properties or technical configuration records evidence of passing events to which it can bear witness. Whether these events register as a by-product of an unintentional encounter or as an expression of direct action, history and by extension politics is registered at these junctures of ontological intensity. Moreover, in disclosing these encoded events, the material witness makes ‘evident’ the very conditions and practices that convert such eventful materials into matters of evidence."William BlackstoneWORK: Commentaries on the Laws of England
‘eavesdroppers, or such as listen under walls or windows, or the eaves of a house, to hearken after discourse, and thereupon to frame slanderous and mischievous tales, are a common nuisance and presentable at the court-leet.’
"Speaking on a smuggled phone from inside the Australian-run immigration detention centre on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, Abdul Aziz Muhamat related an anecdote about his day. He'd been standing near the gate when a security guard had called someone's name three or four times. The man was standing nearby but he didn't reply. Aziz told the guard to call his ID number instead - the man responded immediately. 'Look, man, no one is pretending here. Why should he pretend?' Aziz told the guard. 'We forgot our names.'"Annaleese JochemsAnnaleese Jochems grew up in Northland, and works at Book Hound in Newtown. She won the Hubert Church Best First Book award for her novel Baby.Catherine RobertsonCatherine Robertson’s six novels have all been number 1 New Zealand bestsellers. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters. Catherine reviews for the NZ Listener, and is a regular guest on RNZ's The Panel, and Jesse Mulligan’s Book Critic slot. She is on the board of Verb Wellington and on the Book Awards Trust. Catherine’s latest novel is What You Wish For (2019, Penguin Random House).Elisapeta HetaNicky HagerNicky Hager is an author and investigative journalist based in Wellington, New Zealand. He was born and grew up in the small town of Levin, where his East African-born mother Barbara was a counsellor and district councillor, and his Austrian-refugee father Kurt ran a clothing factory. He spent five years at Victoria University in Wellington, gaining a BSc in physics and a BA Hons in philosophy. During university, and for some years after, he was well known in New Zealand for his role in political causes.Nikki-Lee BirdseyNikki-Lee Birdsey was born in Piha. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and a BA from New York University. She has over 30 publications of poetry and prose in the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, and she is currently a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her first book Night As Day was published by VUP in 2019 and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the U.S.Ruby Solley
