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content/topic/lessons-in-how-(not)-to-be-heard.md

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 # Lessons in how (not) to be heard
 
-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. 
+Lesson III of Hito Steyerl's [*How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File* (2013)](https://www.artforum.com/video/hito-steyerl-how-not-to-be-seen-a-fucking-didactic-educational-mov-file-2013-51651) is entitled "How to Become Invisible by Becoming a Picture". There are seven ways, the narrator explains - "to camouflage; to conceal; to cloak; to mask; to be painted; to disguise; to mimicry; to key." Steyerl smears her hands across her cheeks, and the marks she leaves quickly merge with those of the colour chart behind her; as if she is becoming transparent; becoming the picture of the lesson's title (of course, from the viewer's perspecitve, she already was). And then we see a satellite image zooming in on a location in the California desert. Three blocks of colour: two white; one black. Around 2000, we are told, a new standard for satellite resolution targets like the one we are looking at was introduced. "In 1996, photographic resolution in the area is about 12-metres per pixel. Today it is one foot. To become invisible, one has to become smaller or equal to one pixel.” 
 
-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)]. 
+There is so much in this passage. It brings to mind the practices of camouflage and masking developed by [protestors](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/technology/hong-kong-protests-facial-recognition-surveillance.html) in Hong Kong, in an attempt to thwart facial-recognition systems embedded throughout the city; but also Zach Blas' [*Face Cages*](https://zachblas.info/works/face-cages/), which both obscure the face and encase it. Such is the logic of all masks, of course. Blas just makes the point particularly clearly. Under conditions of ubiquitous computer vision, anonymity comes at a cost. 
 
-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. 
+The ambivalent politics of (in)visibility are made even starker in Forensic Architecture's work on Western drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Gaza.
+
+>"The pixel resolution of contemporary, publically available satellite images is not only a product of optics, data storage, or bandwidth capacity, but of legal regulations that bear upon political and even geopolitical rationales. Throughout the height of the drone campaign and for the entire duration of our investigation, the resolution at which satellite images were made publically available was legally kept at 0.5 meters per pixel [ie about a foot]. The reason for halting the process of improving the resolution of publically available satellite images was that at 0.5 meters, the pixel resolution corresponds to the dimensions of the human body - an area 0.5 meters by 0.5 meters is roughly the size of the human body as seen from above." [^Forensic]
+
+So for Forensic Architecture, as for many others, the political challenge is not (or not just) how to become invisible, but how to ensure that certain state practices and injustices do not remain so. "War is invisible," Steyerl tells us. "Capital is invisible."
+
+What would it mean to think about machine listening this way? To recognise the importance of *not* being heard: to make inaudibility a political demand; to develop a structural critique of surveillant and extractive listenings alongside more insurgent tactics for rendering oneself or one's community inaudible. But at the same time to recognise that audibility is also something to be fought for; that very often it is a condition of poilitical participation, or of justice; and to hold open the possibility of a machinic counter-listening; of listening-back.
+
+What is the acoustic equivalent of resolution? Perhaps fidelity; a word that also suggests responsibility. The question is not so much whether to be heard or not, but rather how, why and by whom. This would be one possible starting point for a politics of machinic fidelity.
 
-So, with apologies to Hito Steyerl [ref], some lessons...
 
 ## Lesson 1: How to become (in)audible by disabling silicon ears
 
@@ -35,3 +42,4 @@ Enjoy being listened to; get your coronavirus diagnosis over the phone; get your
 ![ML](static/images/01-1280x706.gif)
 
 # Bibliography
+[^Forensic]: LIBRARY Forensic Architecture, Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (2017),p27.