Machine listening

Established in 2020 by artist-researchers Sean Dockray, James Parker, and Joel Stern, Machine Listening is a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation. The collective works across diverse media and modes of production, including writing, installation, curation, software, music, radio, pedagogy, and performance. Their work has been exhibited at galleries in Australia and Europe, including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Cricoteka Tadeusz Kantor Museum, Galerie Nord, National Communication Museum, RMIT Design Hub, and MUMA. They have performed at Unsound Festival, Soft Centre, and Melbourne Recital Centre, among others.

https://machinelistening.exposed/

This tour celebrates the release of Environments 12 on Belgian label Futura Resistenza. Each event will feature a presentation of the Environments 12 work and accompanying talks and discussions.

Machine Listening are supported on this tour by RMIT University, ARC DECRA DE200101447, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S).

Environments 12

‘Is it difficult to reproduce the sounds of nature?’

Environments 12 is a new, speculative addition to the once-popular Environments series: a sequence of 11 records released between 1969 and 1979 that anticipated a mass-market in mood-altering nature recordings. The work was originally commissioned as a multi-channel audio installation, presenting a world in which the environment itself has been updated. In this world, the reproduction, synthesis and management of soundscapes has become ubiquitous and planetised. Loudspeakers and microphones are laced through the biosphere, all in the name of a cybernetic ecology. A collection of songs and fables recovered from the ruins of a future history.