URL: eavesdropping.exposed

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.

EAVESDROPPING is a unique collaboration between Liquid Architecture, Melbourne Law School and the Ian Potter Museum of Art, comprising an exhibition, a public program, series of working groups and touring event which explores the politics of listening through work by leading artists, researchers, writers and activists from Australia and around the world.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS

Athanasius Kircher, Fayen d’Evie and Jen Bervin with Bryan Phillips and Andy Slater, Joel Spring, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Manus Recording Project Collective; Michael Green, André Dao, Jon Tjhia, Abdul Aziz Muhamat, Farhad Bandesh, Behrouz Boochani, Samad Abdul, Shamindan Kanapathi and Kazem Kazemi, Samson Young, Sean Dockray, Susan Schuppli, William Blackstone

TALKS & PERFORMANCES

Andrew Brooks, Brian Hochman, Ceri Hann, Jake Goldenfein, Jasmine Guffond, Jennifer Stoever, M J Grant, Mark Andrejevic, Mehera San Roque, Peter Szendy, Poppy de Souza, Sam Kidel, Samson Young, Sara Ramshaw, Sean Dockray, Susan Schuppli, Tim McNamara

Acknowledgements

Exhibition Design: Sibling Architecture
Technical Design: Marco Cher-Gibard
Online/Offline: Public Office

CURATORS

Joel Stern (Liquid Architecture) and Dr James Parker (Melbourne Law School).