Event/s
Human worth is increasingly defined in measurable quantities. Our data is harvested for profit through social media platforms and web browsing activity. We are made precarious by working conditions that require us to be flexible entrepreneurs of the self. Perhaps worse than the expectation that we must market ourselves to possible employers, is the sense that we must also demonstrate our quantifiable qualities to our peers. Psychologists have found that in this neoliberal era, what they call ‘socially-oriented perfectionism’ has increased, leading to anxiety and paranoia. Our acceptance of these conditions is a matter of survival, but the complicity of movements like the ‘Quantified Self’, which promotes power through continuously quantifying the self, turns what might be a partial survival strategy into a new mode of defining human worth.
So how do we resist such conditions? I suggest that the first step is in becoming unquantifiable; recovering a sense of self beyond the limits of our data-set, and feeding the parts of ourselves that are squashed by these neoliberal conditions.
In this workshop, we will together make public ‘profiles’ of ourselves that are unquantifiable. We will take photographs of ourselves that make us invisible to facial recognition software, and recordings of our voices that are unintelligible to voice recognition software. Through these (often silly) practices of self-representation, we will ask: what would it feel like to become unquantifiable?
To RSVP: info@liquidarchitecture.org.au
Tue, 24. Jul–
Sun, 28. Oct
2018
EAVESDROPPING used to be a crime. According to William Blackstone, in his 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.’ Two hundred and fifty years later, eavesdropping isn’t just legal, it’s ubiquitous. What was once a minor public order offence has become one of the most important politico-legal problems of our time, as the Snowden revelations made abundantly clear. Eavesdropping: the ever-increasing access to, capture and control of our sonic worlds by state and corporate interests.
But eavesdropping isn’t just about big data, surveillance and security. We all overhear. Listening itself is excessive. We cannot help but hear too much, more than we mean to. Eavesdropping, in this sense, is the condition – or the risk – of sociality per se, so that the question is not whether to eavesdrop, but the ethics and politics of doing so. This project pursues an expanded definition of eavesdropping therefore, one that includes contemporary mechanisms for listening-in but also activist practices of listening back, that is concerned with malicious listenings but also the responsibilities of the earwitness.
This project directs our attention towards specific technologies (audio-tape, radio-telescope, networked intelligence) and politics (surveillance, settler colonialism, detention). Some contributions address the personal and intimate, others are more distant or forensic. Their scale ranges from the microscopic to the cosmic, from the split-second to the interminable. What all the artists and thinkers involved have in common, however, is a concern not just for sound or listening, but what it might mean for someone or something to be listened-to.
Movement 1: Overhear (July 24–August 5)
wiretapping, the sonic episteme, sonic agency,
excessive listening, forensic listening
Movement 2: Silicon ear (Aug 9–11)
big data, automation, algorithmic listening,
panacousticism
Movement 3: Earwitness (August 20–31)
the sonic colour line, sonic warfare, listening to history, the hearing, justice as improvisation
Movement 4: Listen Back (Oct 19-28)
Movement 1: Overhear
Movement 2: Silicon ear
Movement 3: Earwitness
Movement 4: Listen Back