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: Sunday, 17 October 2021

9pm AEST, 12pm CET. {{< nosup black >}}REGISTER{{< /nosup >}}

Liquid Architecture x Unsound

Machine Listening returns to Unsound in 2021, having launched last year, with the next episode in the curriculum. Unnatural Language Processing explores the history, politics and artistic potential of automatic speech recognition.

Along with talks, conversations and newly commissioned audio experiments, the session launches an ‘instrument’, built in collaboration with Reduct, for the filtering, processing and manipulation of speech and text, which the public will be invited to play.

Appearing at the live session are {{< nosup black >}}Alessandro Bosetti{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Martina Raponi{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Sue Tompkins{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Roslyn Orlando{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Justin Clemens{{< /nosup >}}, and {{< nosup black >}}Mehak Sawney{{< /nosup >}}; plus contributions by{{< nosup black >}}Robert Ochshorn{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Jennifer Walshe{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Tomomi Adachi{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Johannes Kreidler{{< /nosup >}}, Michael McClelland and more.

Instruments are for playing. Preview the instrument now: {{}}word processor{{}}.

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 >}}Andrew Brooks{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}DeForrest Brown Jr. (Speaker Music){{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Bridget Chappell{{< /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 >}}Stefan Maier{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Shannon Mattern{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Mattin{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Lauren Lee McCarthy{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Lee Weng Choy{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Luca Lum{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}} Yeshimabeit Milner (Data for Black Lives){{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Jazz Money{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Thao Phan{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Martina Raponi{{< /nosup >}}, {{< nosup black >}}Kathy Reid (Mozilla){{< /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 >}}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 >}}.

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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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.