Event/s
###Susan Schuppli: Material Witnesses
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.
SUSAN SCHUPPLI is a Canadian artist, researcher and audio-investigator currently associated with the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture. Over the last twenty years, Schuppli has returned again and again to the theme of eavesdropping, with a particular concern for the material history and politics of audio-tape and the telephone.
###Sam Kidel: Customer Service Agent
Where do you hear my voice? Do you hear it in the bone behind your ear? Does it radiate from your chest, towards your shoulders and beyond your body? Sometimes when I hear a voice over the phone, it vibrates from the speaker at my ear, down the bone to the back of my neck, and sits there, humming, behind my vocal cords.
Customer Service Agent is a sound performance piece exploring the call centre worker as a figure of subjection to contemporary capitalism, and the place of noise, intimacy, and fantasy in this tedious, alienated work.
“Since working in call centres for a decade, I have been making art that explores this setting through sound. Call centres are places of constant eavesdropping: the workers listen to the callers, the team leaders listen to the workers, the managers listen to all. While centres collect and transmit certain types of ‘signal’, I’m interested in ‘noise’: the intimacy of words and sounds off-script, disintegrating hold music played through imprecise telephone lines, and disruption.”
SAM KIDEL is a British artist, musician and researcher. His 2016 album Disruptive Muzak (Death of Rave) was described by Boomkat as ‘a modern ambient masterpiece… the most prescient record of our times’.
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