Machine Listening is an investigation and experiment in collective learning, instigated by artist Sean Dockray, legal scholar James Parker, and curator Joel Stern for Liquid Architecture.

The project launched in October 2020 with an open access curriculum site and series of online presentations, performances and pedagogical experiments at Unsound Festival in Poland, and reconvenes on Sat, 13. Mar 2021 with a new online live event, Improvisation and Control.

Staged as part of the NTU CCA Singapore’s recurring Free Jazz exhibition program, this episode will focuses on the complex and evolving dialectic between improvisation and control, framed via a detour into the experimental computer music laboratories of the 1980s and 1990s where the term ‘machine listening’ first begins to circulate.

Machine Listening: Improvisation and Control will feature new performances, presentations and works by Bridget Chappell and Allison Walker (Australia), Mattin (Basque Country), Luca Lum (Singapore), Bani Haykal (Singapore), Lee Weng Choy (Malaysia), Lee Gamble (UK) and Jessica Feldman (USA).

Attendance of this event is via Zoom, with live streams on the Liquid Architecture Facebook and YouTube channels.

Our devices are listening to us. Previous generations of audio-technology transmitted, recorded or manipulated sound. Today our digital voice assistants, smart speakers and a growing range of related technologies are now able to analyse and respond to it as well. Scientists and engineers increasingly refer to this as 'machine listening', though the first widespread use of the term was in computer music. Machine listening is much more than just a new scientific discipline or vein of technical innovation however. It is also an emergent field of knowledge-power, of data extraction and colonialism, capital accumulation, automation and the management of desire. It demands critical and artistic attention.

https://machinelistening.exposed/curriculum/

WHY A CURRICULUM?
Machine Listening, a curriculum is an evolving resource, comprising existing and newly commissioned writing, interviews, music and artworks. As the project grows, the curriculum will too. The curriculum can be accessed here.

Amidst oppressive and extractive forms of state and corporate listening, practices of collaborative study, experimentation and resistance will, we hope, enable us to develop strategies for recalibrating our relationships to machine listening, whether through technological interventions, alternative infrastructures, new behaviors, or political demands. With so many cultural producers – whose work and research is crucial for this kind of project – thrown into deeper precarity and an uncertain future by the unfolding pandemic, we also hope that this curriculum will operate as a quasi-institution: a site of collective learning about and mobilisation against the coming world of listening machines.

A curriculum is also a technology, a tool for supporting and activating learning. This one is open source. It has been built on a platform developed by Pirate Care for their own experiments in open pedagogy. We encourage everyone to freely use it to learn and organise processes of learning and to freely adapt, rewrite and expand it to reflect their own experience and serve their own pedagogies.