Machine Listening

James Parker Joel Stern Sara Ramshaw Sean Dockray Seth Kim-Cohen

Wed, 24. Jul 2019

Melbourne Law School
Room 102, Level 1
Law 106
185 Pelham Street

6pm-730pm
FREE

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From Siri to state surveillance, machine listening is playing an increasingly central role in modern life. But what will it mean to live in a world of ubiquitous over-hearing, and how will this new field of science and technology affect how we inhabit our sonic environments?

Join Art Institute of Chicago Associate Professor Seth Kim-Cohen, Liquid Architecture artistic director Joel Stern, University of Victoria Associate Professor Sara Ramshaw and MLS Senior Lecturer Dr James Parker in a panel discussion about the aesthetic, philosophical, moral, legal and political implications of networked machine listening.

Art Installation: Always Learning (2018) by Sean Dockray

Always Learning stages an increasingly reflexive conversation between three devices – an Amazon Echo, a Google Home Assistant, and an Apple Homepod – and invites us to consider the possible implications of autonomic computing, the rise of voice operation and our increasing comfort levels with devices that listen by default. Electronic personal assistants, Dockray suggests, are just the kindergarten for a vast corporate listening apparatus – an algorithmic ‘panacousticon’ – the effects of which we should not expect to be benign.

Artists

James Parker

James Parker is the Director of a research program on Law, Sound and the International at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) at Melbourne Law School.

Joel Stern

Joel Stern is a curator, researcher, and artist working with theories and practices of sound and listening

Sara Ramshaw

"Law and jazz thus coalesce in the irresolution of the improvised act... Law cannot subsist without jazz’s responsive 'opening onto all that lies beyond' just as jazz requires 'some' determinacy in order to endure as jazz. It is therefore 'the necessity yet impossibility' of both pure determinacy (law) and pure responsiveness (jazz), which 'iteratively impel[s]' both law and jazz into existence."

Sean Dockray

"There are many conversations that happen on social media that are worth archiving and re-presenting outside of the perpetual present of those platforms. The Facebook timeline is like a broken toilet, constantly flushing. The collective knowledge generated within a status updates that generates hundreds of comments or a particularly active and focused group needs to be rescued from the planned forgetfulness of social media."

Seth Kim-Cohen

Seth Kim-Cohen is an artist, musician, and writer who makes as little distinction between these categories as he can get away with. He is author of Against Ambience (2013), In The Blink of an Ear: Toward A Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (2009), and One Reason To Live: Conversations About Music (2006). His gallery-based practice – which Artforum describes as “collegial and awkward, a real-life mistake framed by a semifictitious context” – has been presented on all but three continents. His bands Nil/Resplendent, The Fire Show, and Number One Cup have released eight full-length albums since 1995. Kim-Cohen is Associate Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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