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@@ -4,11 +4,13 @@ has_lessons: [] |
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# Lessons in how not to be heard |
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This is not a manifesto. It is the first draft of an open curriculum, conceived, drafted and delivered online, during a global pandemic, for Unsound, a festival of music and arts. It is an experiment in collaborative study and collective learning at a time when education and the arts feel more precarious than ever; which is saying something. A curriculum is also a technology, a tool for supporting and activating learning. And this one is open source. In addition to texts like this, it gathers new artworks alongside existing writing and resources on machine listening, as well as a growing series of interviews with artists, thinkers, activists and developers working in the area. Its home, for now, is machinelistening.exposed, where it is built on a platform developed by Pirate Care for their own experiments in open pedagogy [ref]. We encourage everyone to use all this however they see fit, and in doing so to freely adapt, rework and expand it to reflect their own experience and serve their own pedagogies. |
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This is not a manifesto. It is the first draft of an open curriculum, conceived, drafted and delivered online, during a global pandemic, and launched at Unsound, a festival of music and arts. It is an experiment in collaborative study and collective learning at a time when education and the arts feel more precarious than ever; which is saying something. A curriculum is also a technology, a tool for supporting and activating learning. And this one is open source. In addition to texts like this, it gathers new artworks alongside existing writing and resources on machine listening, as well as a growing series of interviews with artists, thinkers, activists and developers working in the area. Its home, for now, is machinelistening.exposed, where it is built on a platform developed by Pirate Care for their own experiments in open pedagogy [ref]. We encourage everyone to use all this however they see fit, and in doing so to freely adapt, rework and expand it to reflect their own experience and serve their own pedagogies. |
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In our way of thinking, machine listening poses a challenge at least as urgent as computer vision, search or social media... indeed, all the more urgent for having received so much less critical attention. One of the things we want to do with this project is to 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 [‘](https://www.audioanalytic.com/)empowering machines with the sense of hearing' [[ref](https://www.audioanalytic.com/)], and who are subject to so little democratic scrutiny. Our project is, in this sense, a matter of resistance. And if it envisages an abolitionist horizon, what would be abolished is not so much a collection of audio technologies or data scientific methods but the material and ideological systems of which they are a part, and which they help to constitute, perpetuate and entrench [[Data4BlackLives](https://d4bl.org/programs.html)]. |
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But we also don't want to foreclose more utopian possibilities: to rule out in advance forms of machine listening that would be more emancipatory or constructive. This imaginative work will have to be done, since machine listening will not be put back in its box. But we are not there yet. For now, the only lessons we have to offer are very provisional. We must learn together how not to be heard, or rather how to assert some degree of agency over when we are heard and how. So, with apologies to Hito Steyerl [ref]... |
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But we also don't want to foreclose more utopian possibilities: to rule out in advance forms of machine listening that would be more emancipatory or constructive. This imaginative work will have to be done, since machine listening will not be put back in its box. But we are not there yet. For now, the only lessons we have to offer are very provisional. We must learn together how not to be heard, or rather how to assert some degree of agency over when we are heard and how. |
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So, with apologies to Hito Steyerl [ref], some lessons... |
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## Lesson 1: How to become inaudible by disabling silicon ears |
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