Event/s
UNSW Galleries is proud to present an evening of talks by and conversation with Jennifer Stoever, M J Grant and Andrew Brooks as part of Eavesdropping, a major project by Liquid Architecture, Melbourne Law School and The Ian Potter Museum of Art exploring the politics of listening and being listened-to.
###Jennifer Stoever - The Sonic Color Line
We need to talk about listening, power, and race. Willful white mishearings and auditory imaginings of blackness—often state sanctioned—have long been a matter of life and death in the United States. However, recent events— and large-scale protests testifying to their occurrence and amplifying their impact—have temporarily halted the usual silence surrounding the violent consequences of the racialization of both sound and listening. In this talk, Dr Stoever will speak to some of these events in relation to what she calls the ‘sonic color line’, the learned cultural mechanism that establishes racial difference through listening habits and uses sound to communicate one’s position vìs-a-vìs white citizenship.
###M J Grant - Harm and Harmony
Although it has come to widespread public attention only through methods used by US security agencies in the“War on Terror”, the uses of music in torture and ill-treatment are much more extensive, both in the present and in the past. In Europe from the Middle Ages onwards, many formal and informal practices of justice made reference to musical tropes, particularly the contrast between harmony and dissonance. Traditions of public shaming which folklorists and historical anthropologists have gathered under the general term “charivari” generally incorporated a cacophony of noises. Some aspects of these practices resonate in rituals used in military justice in the eighteenth and nineteenth century: military justice and discipline seem in turn to have informed the ways that music has been used both in the Soviet Gulag and, even more extensively, in the context of Nazi persecution and genocide.
###Andrew Brooks - Fugitive Listening
The question and problem of who is afforded a voice — of what voices are heard as speech and what voices are heard as noise — is connected to the history of the modern subject. This lecture will consider the transformation of the voice into an ideal object that comes to represent the liberal subject of post-Enlightenment thought. Separated from the corporeal noises of the body, the voice of the liberal subject is dematerialised and transformed into a static image of sound that is both illusory and impossible. Despite its phantasmagorical nature, this idealised voice that speaks in the form of a univocal demand is inextricably linked to the liberal ideologies of possession and accumulation that underpin the logics of settler colonialism and its shifting forms of racialisation. Against the idealised voice of liberalism, we might open our ears to the noisy voices and fugitive modes of speech that sound outside the locus of the politics proper. Listening in to moments in pop music, the murmur of crowds, the urgent whispers of a gossip network, and active silence, this lecture proposes a type of fugitive listening that attends to voices historically excluded from the political sphere.
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