curriculum/content/curriculum/index.md

title	has_topics	description
Machine Listening	[against-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md lessons-in-how-not-to-be-heard.md listening-with-the-pandemic.md improvisation-and-control.md unnatural-language-processing.md interviews.md]	Machine Listening Curriculum: A platform for collective listening, thought, and artistic production: a critical counterpoint to all the solutionists, VCs, militarists and industry boosters intent on 'empowering machines with the sense of hearing'.

Next Session: Monday, 6 December 2021

Thao Phan: Listening to Misrecognition

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What is the sound of racialisation? How might we listen to misrecognition? What does machine error tell us about the precision of racism? And how can the tools of a racist system be used to transcribe new forms of resistance?

This experimental presentation by feminist technoscience researcher Thao Phan brings together critical work on race and algorithmic culture with new techniques for dissecting and analysing automatic speech recognition, applied to personal and public archives drawn from Thao’s life and research. In addition to Thao’s presentation, the event will feature a discussion and demonstration of the Word Processor tool, developed by the Machine Listening team and Reduct, a US-based tech company co-founded by the artist Robert Ochschorn, and recently launched as part of the event Unnatural Language Processing, at Unsound Festival.

This event is part of the Artistic program for the 2021 Digital Intimacies #7 Symposium hosted in partnership with UQ Art Museum’s Conflict in My Outlook exhibition series. It is presented in partnership with ANU Art, Politics and Social Engagement and supported by the Digital Cultures and Societies Initiative and UQ Node of the Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.

Machine Listening, a curriculum

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.

MACHINE LISTENING 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. It comes out of our previous work on Eavesdropping.

Contributors

{{< nosup black >}}Tomomi Adachi{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Angie Abdilla (Old Ways, New){{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Lawrence Abu Hamdan{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Alex Ahmed (Project Spectra){{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Mark Andrejevic{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Alessandro Bosetti{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Andrew Brooks{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}DeForrest Brown Jr. (Speaker Music){{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Bridget Chappell{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Lee Weng Choy{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Kate Crawford (AI Now){{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}André Dao{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Debris Facility{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Mat Dryhurst (Interdependence){{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Jessica Feldman{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Lee Gamble (UK){{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Jasmine Guffond{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Bani Haykal{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Roslyn Helper{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Jenny Kennedy{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Vladan Joler{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Karolina Iwańska (Panoptykon Foundation){{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Jules LaPlace{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Halcyon Lawrence{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Jon Leidecker (Wobbly){{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Jùnchéng Billy Lì{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Lauren Lee McCarthy{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Luca Lum{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Stefan Maier{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Shannon Mattern{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Mattin{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Michael McLelland{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}} Yeshimabeit Milner (Data for Black Lives){{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Jazz Money{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Robert Ochshorn{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Thao Phan{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Martina Raponi{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Kathy Reid (Mozilla){{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Mehak Sawney{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Snack Syndicate{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Joel Spring{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Tom Smith{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Yolande Strengers{{< /nosup >}},{{< nosup black >}}Hito Steyerl{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Sue Tompkins{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Jennifer Walshe{{< /nosup >}}.

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.

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. And 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. As the curriculum unfolds, these resources will expand: {{< nosup black >}}event documentation{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}interviews{{< /nosup >}}, and {{< nosup black >}}library{{< /nosup >}}.

Research and writing assistance from Zoë De Luca

Images designed by Debris Facility

Sessions

Machine Listening (02-04. Octorber 2020, Liquid Architecture x Unsound)

Across three days at the start of October 2020, we came 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 were divided into three sections, open to all:

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Improvisation and Control (13. March 2021, Liquid Architecture x NTU CCA Singapore)

As part of Free Jazz III, Improvisation and Control explores machine listening’s history in computer music, and the evolving dynamics between improvisation and control.

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Unnatural Language Processing (17. October 2021, Liquid Architecture x Unsound)

Machine Listening returned to Unsound in 2021 with Unnatural Language Processing, exploring the history, politics and artistic potential of automatic speech recognition. The session also launched an ‘instrument’, built in collaboration with {{}}Reduct{{}}. {{}}Instruments are for playing.{{}}. Works best with Firefox.

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Acknowledgements

Machine Listening is presented by Liquid Architecture, and developed in partnership with Melbourne Law School, ANU School of Art & Design, Unsound, and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

Liquid Architecture thank our supporters Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne. The project has also received funding from the Australia Research Council.

This project takes place online, and across multiple unceded Indigenous Lands. Liquid Architecture acknowledges the people of the Kulin Nation as the custodians of the lands on which we work. We pay our respects to Indigenous Elders, past, present and emerging.