About
Your phone is already a listening machine. So, increasingly, is the environment around you.
In this hands-on workshop, artist collective Machine Listening introduce participants to Konvolute, their software for composing with video and data as raw material. Participants will head out into Ngāmotu to shoot short videos on their phones, returning to pool the footage into a shared dataset. Together, we’ll cut, layer, and recombine the footage, building a kind of environmental score from what the group has collectively recorded.
This is not just a technical exercise. As microphones, cameras, and sensors are embedded across the planet transforming physical places into streams of data, what kinds of listening is being produced, and for whom? What happens to a place when it becomes footage, a dataset to be acted upon? What does it mean for your video to become a data point in someone else’s system of interpretation or control?
Working with Konvolute, this workshop invites participants to experiment with these questions in practice: to listen with and against automation, to introduce noise and ambiguity into systems that tend toward total capture and operational control. What might a more situated, plural, and accountable form of machine listening look and sound like?
No prior technical experience is required. Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop.
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Bio:
Machine Listening is a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation, founded in 2020 by Sean Dockray, James Parker, and Joel Stern in order to subject automated systems to political and aesthetic scrutiny. The collective works across writing, installation, performance, music, software, curation, pedagogy, and radio. Their work has been presented at major institutions including ACCA (Melbourne), Cricoteka Tadeusz Kantor Museum (Kraków), Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, Galerie Nord (Berlin), RMIT Design Hub (Melbourne), and MUMA (Melbourne), also performing at Unsound Festival, Soft Centre, and Melbourne Recital Centre.