Machine Listening, a curriculum is a new investigation and experiment in collective learning instigated by artist Sean Dockray, legal scholar James Parker and curator Joel Stern for Liquid Architecture and launched at Unsound 2020: Intermission.

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 increasingly 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, of capital accumulation, automation and control. It demands critical and artistic attention.

Contributors

Angie Abdilla (Old Ways New), Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Alex Ahmed (Project Spectra), Mark Andrejevic, Andrew Brooks, DeForrest Brown Jr. (Speaker Music), Kate Crawford (AI Now), André Dao, Mat Dryhurst (Interdependence), Debris Facility, Jasmine Guffond, Jenny Kennedy, Vladan Joler, Karolina Iwańska (Panoptykon Foundation), Jules LaPlace, Halcyon Lawrence, Jùnchéng Billy Lì, Stefan Maier, Shannon Mattern, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Yeshimabeit Milner (Data for Black Lives), Jazz Money, Thao Phan, Kathy Reid (Mozilla), Joel Spring, Tom Smith, Yolande Strengers, Hito Steyerl, Jennifer Walshe.

Schedule

Across three days at the start of October, we will come together to investigate the implications of the coming world of listening machines in both its dystopian and utopian dimensions. Comprising a montage of presentations, performance, sound, video, music and experiments in listening featuring contributors from around the world, the online gatherings are divided into three sections, open to all:

[Against] the coming world of listening machines
Fri, 02. October
9–11pm AEST
RSVP

This first session offers a diagnostic of the near future. What will it mean to live in a world of listening machines? What would it require to make machine listening a field of contestation or emancipation?

Lauren McCarthy, Yeshimabeit Milner (Data for Black Lives), Kate Crawford (AI Now), Stefan Maier, Hito Steyerl, André Dao, Jennifer Walshe, Tom Smith and more

Lessons in how [not] to be heard
Sat, 03. October
9–11pm AEST
RSVP

This second session offers a series of lessons in how (not) to be heard, ranging from the structural to the technical, and from the aesthetic to the activist.

How might we institute and provide a platform for a global community as a critical counterpoint to all the capitalists and solutionists, militarists and industry boosters intent on empowering machines with a sense of hearing?

Jules LaPlace, Halcyon Lawrence, Panoptykon Foundation, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Alex Ahmed (Project Spectra), Joel Spring and Jazz Money, Mat Dryhurst (Interdependence), DeForrest Brown Jr. (Speaker Music) and more

Listening with the pandemic
Sun, 04. October
10–12pm AEDT
RSVP

The third of three experimental Zoom sessions investigating the coming world of listening machines in all its dystopian and utopian dimensions.

From the perspective of the machine listening industry, the pandemic is not an intermission, it’s an opportunity: a dream come true. Thoughtlessness, touchlessness, wakewordlessness: listening with the pandemic, these and other tendencies of machine listening are more apparent than ever, only blanketed now in the twin auras of inevitability and social good.

What’s clear is that machine listening will not be put back in its box. Imaginative work will have to be done to provoke something more emancipatory or constructive in the pandemic’s wake. As Shannon Mattern puts it: “When the sounds of the pandemic recede, how will our hearing be changed?”

Sean Dockray, Mark Andrejevic, Thao Phan, Vladan Joler, Andrew Brooks, Shannon Mattern, Jasmine Guffond and more

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: https://machinelistening.exposed/

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.