Event/s
###Stretching the Truth: A performance lecture by Susan Schuppli
“Next to a man’s wife, his secretary is the most important person in his career. She has to understand every detail of his job; to have unquestioning loyalty and absolute discretion. On every count Rose measures up. I’m a lucky man”.—Richard Nixon, 1957
At some point during the evening of June 20 1972 a conversation between two men was secretly taped using cheap lavalier microphones and a tape recorder set to run at an irregular speed. The result was a tape of degraded sound quality produced under deficient recording conditions. Of the more than 3,700 hours of audio confiscated from the Oval Office, Tape 342 remains by far the most infamous. Not because of the shocking information it contains, but because of its absence: 18-1/2 minutes of missing audio. The tape-gap occurs during a rambling conversation between Nixon and White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman just three days after the break-in at Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.
When news of the tape’s potential tampering was made public, Nixon’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods took responsibility for this breach in the historical record. Under cross-examination in a federal courtroom, she told a rather confused story of how she might have made “a terrible mistake” and been partially responsible for the glitch. Woods claimed that while she had been transcribing and typing the conversations of 20 June 1972, the telephone suddenly rang causing her to press the wrong pedal on her foot-controlled UHER tape recorder, which she was using for purposes of playback, resulting in the erasure. Forensic acoustic analysis would ultimately overturn her testimony.
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.
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