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SUSAN SCHUPPLI, The Missing 18 1/2 Minutes (Listening to Tapes), 2012, archival photograph. Courtesy the artist.
Comprising an exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne and a considerable public program of lectures and performances spilling into Sydney and Brisbane, “Eavesdropping” was the result of a collaboration between curator, researcher and sound artist Joel Stern and James Parker, a researcher at Melbourne Law School. Extending an early definition of the eavesdropper in William Blackstone’s book Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) as one who “listens under walls or windows, or the eaves of a house, to hearken after discourse, and thereupon to frame slanderous and mischievous tales,” the project examined the technics, legalities and politics of what it might mean for someone or something to be listened to.
A public program broken up into a series of “movements” highlighted the themes running throughout the exhibition. I joined the audience of “Movement 1: Overhear,” in Sydney, which included, among six other presentations, talks by Jasmine Guffond and Forensic Architecture’s Susan Schuppli, addressing sonic epistemes and agencies, as well as excessive and forensic listening. Guffond’s presentation, titled “The Web Never Forgets,” introduced the topics of online, automated data capturing systems and the pervasive reach of surveillance capitalism. Her artwork Listening Back (2017)—a Google Chrome browser extension that sonifies cookies—generated a disturbingly lively soundtrack that accompanied her lecture on the origins of the Internet cookie. This tracking mechanism was invented for e-commerce in the mid-1990s to remember visitors to online stores and information such as the items added to their online shopping carts, and is now commonly used for data profiling by advertising companies, corporations and governments.
Schuppli’s lecture-performance “Uneasy Listening” addressed the terror induced by the constant hum of drone patrols in the Afghan-border zone of Pakistan, particularly in survivors of drone strikes, as well as the Israeli army’s use of sonic booms—created when air force jets break the sound barrier at low altitude—to terrorize Palestinians. The latter case has been brought to court by human rights activists, who claim sonic booms, the effects of which have been likened to earthquakes or bomb detonations, are a form of collective punishment and intimidation in violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The sonic effect of drone sorties, argues Schuppli, might also be considered a form of collective punishment, prosecutable through international law. During the lecture, the audience experienced the unsettling impacts of these sounds passing overhead through a four-channel stereo system.
Contrastively, working against the practices of precision employed in forensic analysis, “Movement 2: Silicon Ear,” presented in Melbourne, put forward techniques of obfuscation as a means of avoiding capture and maintaining data privacy via six events. We met outside a nondescript warehouse for a workshop on “Becoming Unquantifiable” in which Sam Kidel prompted us to invent ways to thwart voice and facial recognition softwares by obscuring and distorting our face and speech, thus creating profiles of us that are “unquantifiable”—an increasingly difficult task as artificial intelligences learn and grow ever more observant. Privacy protection seemed particularly important, however, following an earlier presentation by Sean Dockray of his work Always Learning (2018), which stages a conversation between a Google Home, an Amazon Echo, and an Apple Homepod to consider the future of artificial intelligence, and the implications of the neural network created by these listening and learning devices nestled inside our homes.
“Movement 3: Earwitness” comprised four events that considered political and responsible listening, and how to listen with an ear for social justice. In her fascinating talk, musicologist MJ Grant identified the position of the “barbarian” as a building block of an ideology of “othering.” Originally referring to those who could not speak the “civilized” tongue of the ancient Greeks, the idea of the barbarian serves to delineate the rational subject who makes sense from the irrational babble of the other who does not. Comparing the perceived sound of the barbarian to Charivari or “rough music,” a centuries-old tradition of public shaming involving acoustic dissonance created by community members banging on different objects, Grant demonstrates how non-sense noise has been used to sound out ruptures in a contained environment of relative social harmony, and to ritualize punishment. Conversely, she goes on to argue, melodic music has also been used to ritualize and thus create meaning in sense-less violence to make that violence socially acceptable within militaries and in militarized states such as Nazi Germany.
In his presentation Andrew Brooks also addressed the issue of which voices are heard as speech and which are heard as noise. With reference to histories of slavery and race relations in the United States, and conceiving voice as an index of the subject, Brooks identifies the self-possessive singular voice as belonging to a white subject, whose accumulated and cultured self is defined and enabled by the dispossession of the black subject. Asking what then to make of voices that do not individuate, possess, or self-accumulate, Brooks finds an answer in the idea of “fugitive sonicities,” which work against the logic of accumulation to undermine the value of the commodity and the social order that is built around it. These sonicities can be found in the crowd, in the hush tones of the gossip network, in voices that enact a politics of refusal and in the riot. He argues for a fugitive listening practice to detect these sonicities—one that attunes the ear towards those in excess of signification, and to voices that interrupt the regular flows of language.
The “sonic color line” of a segregated society was finally interrogated by Jennifer Stoever in her examination of the cadences of “cop voice.” Recalling the difference in tone when police addressed Stoever, a white woman, as opposed to her black friends in the US, Stoever argues that cop voice sonifies white supremacy. This inequality, she furthered, is challenged in hip hop tracks recounting black MC’s encounters with the law; through their music, these artists make us all earwitnesses to injustice.
“Movement 4: Listen Back” will take place in October, 2018.
The exhibition “Eavesdropping” is on view at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, until October 28, 2018.
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