Shanghai native 33EMYBW (Wu Shanmin) has been an active member in the Chinese music scene for over a decade. She has also performed at CTM and Sinotronics in Germany, China Drifting Festival in Switzerland, and SXSW. Her 2018 album Golem, released on SVBKVLT, was met with critical acclaim and voted one of the best electronic albums of 2018 by Bandcamp. In 2019 she released DONG2 EP under Merrie Records Beijing, and will premiere her sophomore album Arthropods (SVBKVLT) at Unsound 2019.
Aasma Tulika is an artist based in Delhi. Her practice locates technological infrastructures as sites to unpack how power embeds, affects, and moves narrative making processes. Her work engages with moments that disturb belief systems through assemblages of video, zines, interactive text, writings and sound. Aasma was a fellow at the Home Workspace Program 2019-20, Ashkal Alwan, her work has appeared in Restricted Fixations, Abr_circle, Khoj Art+Science program, HH Art Space. She is a member of the collective -out-of-line-, and collaboratively maintains a home server hosting an internet radio station. She is currently teaching at Ambedkar University Delhi.
A Hanley is an artist currently living on Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne, Australia. Their practice uses sound and media to explore relations among queer ecologies, attunement, situatedness, and speculative practices. Engaging forms of performance, installation, and collaboration, Hanley's work is interested in audition as an affective practice and the possibilities of sound and technology to support and alter the sonic expressions of humans and non-humans.
Aisyah Aaqil Sumito is an artist and writer living near Derbarl Yerrigan on Whadjuk Noongar Bibbulmun lands. Their work reflects mostly on personal intersections of disability, queerness and diasporic ancestry in so-called 'australia'. They have recently made text-based contributions to Runway Journal and HERE&NOW20: Perfectly Queer, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.
Alessandro Bosetti is an Italian composer, performer and sound artist, currently based in Marseille. His work delves into the musicality of spoken language, utilising misunderstandings, translations and interviews as compositional tools. His works for voice and electronics blur the line between electro-acoustic composition, aural writing and performance.
Alexander Garsden is a Melbourne-based composer, guitarist and electroacoustic musician, working across multiple exploratory musical disciplines. Recent work includes commissions from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Speak Percussion, Michael Kieran Harvey and Eugene Ughetti; alongside performances with artists including Tetuzi Akiyama (Japan), Oren Ambarchi, Radu Malfatti (Austria), Julia Reidy, David Stackenäs (Sweden), and with Erkki Veltheim and Rohan Drape. From 2014 to 2019 Garsden was Co-Director of the INLAND Concert Series. He has taught through RMIT University and the University of Melbourne.
Alexander Powers is a choreographer, performer and DJ from Naarm. In 2019 they premiered their first full length choreographic work Time Loop at the Melbourne Fringe Festival, receiving the Temperance Hall Award at the Fringe Awards. Under the moniker Female Wizard, they are known internationally for their forward-thinking DJ sets. They’ve performed at Golden Plains, Dark Mofo, Boiler Room, Hybrid Festival and Soft Centre and held a four year residency at Le Fag.
Alexandra Spence is a sound artist and musician living on unceded Wangal land in Sydney, Australia. Through her practice Alex attempts to reimagine the intricate relationships between the listener, the object, and the surrounding environment as a kind of communion or conversation. Her aesthetic favours field recordings, analogue technologies and object interventions. Alex has presented her art and music in Australia, Asia, Europe, and North America including BBC Radio; Ausland, Berlin; Café Oto, London; EMS, Stockholm; Punkt Festival, Kristiansand; Standards Studio, Milan; AB Salon, Brussels; Radiophrenia, Glasgow; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Sound Forms Festival, Hong Kong; MONO, Brisbane; The Substation, Melbourne; Soft Centre, and Liveworks Festival, Sydney.
Allanah Stewart is an artist from Aotearoa/New Zealand, currently living in Melbourne, Australia. As well as her work in various experimental music projects, she is the presenter of a monthly podcast radio programme called Enquiring Minds, hosted by Noods radio, which explores old and new, lesser known and well known sounds that loosely fit under the banner of experimental music.
Allison Gibbs is an artist living and working on Djaara Country/Maldon, Victoria. She is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University Art, Design and Architecture (MADA).
Mouth Making an Orifice has been adapted for OOO/LA from a part of Allison’s doctoral research (Orificing as Method).
Amanda Stewart is a poet, author, and vocal artist. She has created a diverse range of publications, performances, film and radio productions in Australia, Europe, Japan, and the USA, working in literature, new music, broadcasting, theatre, dance, and new media environments. Amanda collaborated with Chris Mann for many years in the Australian ensemble, Machine For Making Sense (with Jim Denley, Rik Rue, and Stevie Wishart), as well as in other contexts. Her poem ‘ta’ was written in honour of Chris Mann’s extraordinary vision and work.
Amy Cimini is a musicologist, violist, and Associate Professor of Music at UC San Diego. She works on questions of power, community, and technology in twentieth & twenty-first century experimental music, sound art, and auditory culture. She is the author of Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (OUP 2022) and numerous articles. She embraces feminist historiographic methods and, as a musician, centers performance-based epistemologies to query how culture workers negotiate power and difference within local, regional, and transnational histories.
Anabelle Lacroix is a French-Australian curator, writer and radio contributor. Working independently in Paris, she is based at Fondation Fiminco for a year-long residency focused on the politics of sleeplessness (2020). She has a broad practice, and a current interest in experimental practice, working with performance, sound, discourse and publishing. She is a PhD candidate at UNSW Art & Design.
Ander Rennick is a graphic artist based in Melbourne interested in the fetishisation of editorial, pedagogical, pornographic and mimetic commodities.
Andrew Brooks is an artist, writer, and teacher who lives on unceded Wangal land. He is a lecturer in media cultures at UNSW, one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate, and a member of the Rosa Press Collective. Homework, a book of essays co-written with Astrid Lorange, was recently published by Discipline.
Andrew Fedorovitch is compos mentis. Andrew Fedorovitch embodies professionalism in every aspect of his life, including music.
André Dao is a writer, editor, researcher, and artist. His debut novel, Anam, won the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. He is also the co-founder of Behind the Wire, an oral history project documenting people’s experience of immigration detention and a producer of the Walkley-award winning podcast, The Messenger. He is a member of the Manus Recording Project Collective.
Angela Goh is a dancer and choreographer. Her work poses possibilities for disruption and transformation inside the aesthetics and conditions of technocapitalism, planetarity, and the post-anthropocene. She lives and works in Sydney, and has toured her work across Australia, Europe, the UK, the USA and Asia. She received the 2020 Keir Choreographic Award and the inaugural Sydney Dance Company Beyond the Studio Fellowship 2020-21.
Anna Annicchiarico has a bachelor's degree in Hindi language and literature and she specialised in anthropology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. For her studies, she focused on the effects of orientalism in post-colonial imageries, especially on migrants in Italy, analysing religious places, and their meaning for different generations. In recent years, she has been increasingly involved in contemporary art and performance.
Anna Liebzeit composes for collaborations across installation, theatre, and film. Recent compositions include the feature film The Survival of Kindness (Rolf de Heer 2022), Sleeplessness Carriageworks (Karen Therese 2022), The Darkness of Enlightenment Samstag Museum of Art (James Tylor 2021), kipli pawuta lumi MONA FOMA (2020), and SHIT and LOVE by Dee and Cornelius (45 Downstairs, Venice Biennale 2019, and feature film SHIT 2021). Anna has made music for various NAIDOC events and has had work shown at various venues nationally.
Her solo practice investigates erasure and becoming inscribed, as a personal and broader (Australian) cultural phenomenon. Her research is linked to the lived experience of Stolen Generations and relationality by drawing on Susan Dion’s educative provocation to complicate empathy when engaging with First Nations peoples. Anna has been an educator in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and education for over twenty years and is an award-winning curriculum writer. In 2021 she received the Creative Victoria Creators Fund grant to research the intersections of her teaching and creative methodologies.
Anne Zeitz is associate professor at University Rennes 2. Her research focuses on aural attention, the inaudible, the unheard, and the polyphony in contemporary art. She directed the research project 'Sound Unheard' and she co-organised the eponymous exhibition at the Goethe-Institut Paris, Paris and exhibition 'Échos magnétiques” at the MBA Rennes, Rennes in 2019.
Annika Kristensen is Senior Curator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.
Arben Dzika is an artist whose practice involves working with various media including, but not limited to: sound, image, word, and performance. His work primarily seeks to reflect on, interrogate, and play with technologies, systems, and human senses. Within his practice, he works as a producer and DJ under the moniker, Dilae.
Archie Barry is an interdisciplinary visual artist working with a trans politics of quietude. Their practice is autobiographical, somatic, and process-led, and spans performance, video, music production, and writing. Cultivating a genealogy of personas, they produce self-portraiture that brings to question dominant notions of personhood and representation.
Arlie Alizzi is a Yugambeh writer living between Yawuru Country (Broome) and Wurundjeri Country (Melbourne). He is an editor, writer and researcher. He was an editor for Un Magazine with Neika Lehman in 2018, and co-edited a special issue of Archer Magazine in 2020. He was a writer-in-residence for MPavilion in 2019, and is interested in articulations of place in writing about urban areas.
Audrey Schmidt is a writer and editor based in Melbourne, Australia. She is a regular contributor to Memo Review, co-editor the third issue of Dissect Journal, and has written for various publications including Art Monthly, Art + Australia and un Magazine. She co-founded Minority Report with Adam Hammad in 2018 and released one online issue that was available until the domain expired in 2019. Audrey sits on the FYTA (GR) Board of Advisors.
Austin Benjamin, known for his stage name Utility, is a Sydney-based music producer, artist & founder of the label Trackwork. He’s released projects through Room 40, Sumac, HellosQuare, and produced music for releases on labels including Universal NZ, AVTV, Warner & 66 Records. In 2019 Utility & close collaborator T. Morimoto released Nexus Destiny featuring a collection of 60 arpeggios made entirely with software synthesisers, released on Melbourne-based label Sumac.
Earlier this year Utility performed alongside T Breezy, Walkerboy, Sevy & Bayang at Sydney Opera House’s Barrbuwari event. Austin has previously composed and performed new works for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and University of Queensland Art Museum with T. Morimoto, and MONA FOMA Tasmania with turntablist Martin Ng and has exhibited audio-visual gallery works including ‘Strategic Innovation’ with Coen Young at Kronenberg Wright, Sydney.
Autumn Royal is a poet and researcher based in Narrm/Melbourne. Autumn’s current research examines elegiac expression in contemporary poetry. Autumn is the interviews editor for Cordite Poetry Review, and author of the poetry collections She Woke & Rose and Liquidation.
Beau Lai (formerly Lilly) is an artist and writer currently based in Paris, France. Beau spent their formative years working intensively within the contemporary arts industry on Darug and Gadigal land in so-called 'Australia'. They are most well known for self-publishing their essay and work of institutional critique, 'Working at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. It does not exist in a vacuum', in 2020.
Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. He was writer for the Kurdish language magazine Werya. He writes regularly for The Guardian and several other publications. Boochani is also co-director (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) of the 2017 feature-length film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, and author of No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. He was held on Manus Island from 2013 until 2019.
Ben Raynor is an artist, living in Melbourne.
Bianca Winataputri is a Melbourne-based independent curator and writer researching contemporary practice in Southeast Asia, and relationships between individuals and collectives in relation to history, globalisation, identity and community building. Currently working at Regional Arts Victoria, Bianca was previously Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the NGA. She holds a BA (University of Melbourne), and BA Honours from the ANU where she received the Janet Wilkie Prize for Art. In 2018 Bianca was selected for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s Curators’ Intensive.
Bola Chinelo is a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles. Chinelo’s work uses esoteric symbolism, coding languages, and sonic and iconographic languages to convey messaging.
Brad Darkson is a South Australian visual artist currently working across various media including carving, sound, sculpture, multimedia installation, and painting. Darkson's practice is regularly focused on site specific works, and connections between contemporary and traditional cultural practice, language and lore. His current research interests include traditional land management practices, bureaucracy, seaweed, and the neo-capitalist hellhole we're all forced to exist within. Conceptually, Darkson's work is often informed by his First Nations and Anglo Australian heritage. Brad's mob on his dad's side is the Chester family, with lineages to Narungga and many other Nations in South Australia from Ngarrindjeri to Far West Coast. On his mum's side he is from the Colley and Ball convict and settler migrant families, both arriving in 1839, aboard the Duchess of Northumberland.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist working with sound culture, voice, and questions of agency. Guided by situated and collaborative methodologies, he develops and presents artistic projects and performances within a range of international contexts, mostly working in public and with others. This leads to performative installations, poetic theater, storytelling, and research actions aimed at forms of experimental community making, as well as extra-institutional initiatives, including The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-ongoing). From gestures of intimacy and listening to critical festivity and experimental pedagogy, his practice aligns itself with a politics and poetics of radical hospitality.
Brian Hioe was one of the founding editors of New Bloom, an online magazine covering activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific, founded in 2014 in the wake of the Sunflower Movement. Hioe is a freelance writer on social movements and politics, as well as an occasional translator.
Bridget Chappell works across dance and classical music, speculative technology, ungovernable space, and literature. She DJs and produces music as Hextape and tries to leave a trail of rave breadcrumbs wherever she goes.
Bryan Phillips A.K.A. Galambo is a Chilean/Australian artist working in community arts, music and performance, using sound as a means to facilitate engagement with others. His practice has mainly been developed in Chile, but after completing his Masters in Community Cultural Development (VCA-2013) he has become involved in projects with artists from Timor-Leste, Indonesia and Australia.
Camila Marambio is a private investigator, amateur dancer, permaculture enthusiast, and sporadic writer, but first and foremost, she is a curator and the founder/director of Ensayos, a nomadic interdisciplinary research program in Tierra del Fuego.
Candice Hopkins is a curator, writer and researcher interested in history, art and indigeneity, and their intersections. Originally from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation. She was senior curator for the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art, and worked on the curatorial teams for the Canadian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, and documenta 14.
Casey (Nicholls-Bull) Jones is the assistant editor for Liquid Architecture's Disclaimer.
She is also an artist who utilises embodied knowledge, plant and herbal study, research, and deep listening as the backbones of her practice. Through unhurried and repetitive processes such as pyrographic wood burning techniques, oil painting, and the observation of and connection to natural cycles and materials, Jones uses these methods to rearrange, layer, peel back, and continually connect to knowledges, memories and histories that are personally felt, encountered, and observed around her. Jones uses the moon cycle as a continual framework to maintain the rhythm and logic of her practise, and is continually in the midst of deconstructing the complexity of working as a settler on unceded Wurundjeri land through her processes of both making and understanding. Her hope is that through circling, living through, and re-curringly interrogating these things she studies and tends to, something fruitful may gradually become embodied, communicated and understood in new ways by herself and those who encounter her work.
Sound Mastering: Casey Rice is an audio doula living and practicing on Djaara Country/Castlemaine, Victoria.
Catherine Ryan is an artist who works with performance, sound, text, video and installation. She often uses humour and references to philosophical and pop figures to interrogate the neoliberal disciplining the body. She has exhibited at galleries and festivals in Australia and Europe, including Gertrude Contemporary, MUMA (Melbourne), the Royal College of Art (London), the Vienna Biennale and the Melbourne Art Fair. She is currently a PhD candidate at RMIT University, researching how ideas from experimental composition, cybernetics and performance can help us wrestle with the existential threat of extinction that climate change and other catastrophes pose to life on our planet.
Cecilia Vicuña's work dwells in the not yet, the future potential of the unformed, where sound, weaving, and language interact to create new meanings.
'In January 1966, I began creating precarios (precarious) installations and basuritas, objects composed of debris, structures that disappear, along with quipus and other weaving metaphors. I called these works 'Arte Precario', creating a new independent category, a non-colonized name for them. The precarios soon evolved into collective rituals and oral performances based on dissonant sound and the shamanic voice. The fluid, multi-dimensional quality of these works allowed them to exist in many media and languages at once. Created in and for the moment, they reflect ancient spiritual technologies—a knowledge of the power of individual and communal intention to heal us and the earth.'
—Cecilia Vicuña
Cher Tan is an essayist and critic living and working on unceded Wurundjeri Country. Her work has appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Runway Journal, Art Guide Australia, Catapult and Overland, amongst others. She is an editor at LIMINAL and the books editor at Meanjin. Her debut essay collection, Peripathetic: Notes on (Un)belonging, is forthcoming with NewSouth Publishing in 2024.
Chi Tran is a writer, editor, and an artist who makes poems that may be text, video, object, sound, or drawing. Chi is primarily interested in working with language as a means of coming-to-terms. Their work has been published by Incendium Radical Library Press, Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Poetry and Liminal Magazine and exhibited at galleries including Firstdraft, Sydney; Punk Café, Melbourne; and ACCA, Melbourne. In 2019, as a recipient of The Ian Potter Cultural Trust Fund, Chi spent three months in New York developing their practice with renowned poets including Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Fred Moten, and Jackie Wang.
Christopher L G Hill is an artist, poet, anarchist, collaborator, facilitator, lover, friend, DJ, performer, sound pervader, publisher of Endless Lonely Planet, co-label boss; Bunyip trax, traveller, homebody, dancer, considerate participator, dishwasher, writer, bencher, eater, exhibitor: Sydney, Physics Room, Westspace, TCB, BUS, Punk Cafe,100 Grand street, Lismore Regional Gallery, Good Press, Gambia Castle, Conical, GCAS, NGV, VCA, Mission Comics, Slopes, Art Beat, Papakura Gallery, Neon Parc, UQ Gallery, Tate Modern, Connors Connors, Glasgow International, Sandy Brown, OFLUXO, New Scenarios, Margaret Lawrence, Flake, Utopian Slumps, World Food Books, Sutton, Rearview, Joint Hassles, a basement, a tree, Innen publications, SAM, Chateau 2F, etc, and tweeter, twitcher, sleeper, Biennale director (‘Melbourne Artist initiated’ 2008, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2018-20), DJ, retired gallerist Y3K, conversationalist who represents them self and others, born Melbourne/Narrm 1980c.e, lives World.
http://www.christopherlghill.com/
https://twitter.com/CLGHill
https://www.instagram.com/christopherlghill/
https://bunyiptrax.bandcamp.com/
https://jahjahsphinx.blogspot.com/
https://boobasprite.tumblr.com/
http://counterfeitnessfirst.blogspot.com/
http://newtabandwindowshopper.blogspot.com/
https://www.mixcloud.com/Christopher_L_G_Hill/
http://anotheryouapictureavoicemessagemime.blogspot.com/
Chun Yin Rainbow Chan is a Hong Kong–Australian artist, living in Sydney. Working across music, performance and installation, Rainbow is interested in the copy and how the ways in which it can disrupt Western notions of ownership. Central to Rainbow's work is the circulation of knock-off objects, sounds and images in global media. Her work positions the counterfeit as a complex sign that shapes new myths, values and contemporary commodity production.
Claire G Coleman is a Noongar writer, born in Western Australia, and now based in Naarm. Her family have been from the area around Ravensthorpe and Hopetoun on the south coast of WA since before time started being recorded. Claire wrote her black&write! Fellowship-winning book Terra Nullius while travelling around Australia in a caravan. The Old Lie (2019) was her second novel and in 2021 her acclaimed non-fiction book, Lies, Damned Lies was published by Ultimo Press. Enclave is her third novel. Since mid 2020 Claire has also been a member of the cultural advisory committee for Agency, a Not-for-profit Indigenous arts Consultancy.
Clare M. Cooper has brought together thousands of people to work together on community festivals, skill-share spaces, pleasure activism, speculative design, and critical listening through co-founding the NOW now (2001), Splinter Orchestra (2000), Berlin Splitter Orchester (2009), Frontyard Projects (2016), and Climate Strike Workshop (2019).
She wrote her PhD thesis on the intersections of context-responsive improvised music practice and collaborative design, and is a Lecturer at the University of Sydney School of Design Architecture and Planning. Disclaimer journal's profile on Cooper, written by Jim Denley can be found here.
Clare Milledge is an artist and academic, she lives and works between the lands of the Arakwal people in Bundjalung country (Broken Head, Northern NSW) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal people (Paddington, Sydney). She is a Senior Lecturer at UNSW Art & Design and is represented by STATION gallery.
Coco Klockner is an artist and writer living in New York City. Recent exhibitions include venues such as The Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, Alfred, NY; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; Guadalajara90210, CDMX; The Luminary, St. Louis; Bass & Reiner, San Francisco; Lubov, New York; ONE Archives, Los Angeles; and Egret Egress, Toronto. They are the author of the book K-Y (Genderfail, 2019) and have published writing with Montez Press, Real Life Magazine, Spike Art Magazine, and Burnaway.
Dale Gorfinkel is a musician-artist whose stylefree improvisational approach informs his performances, instrument-building, and kinetic sound installations. Aiming to reflect an awareness of the dynamic nature of culture and the value of listening as a mode of knowing people and places, Dale is interested in bringing creative communities together and shifting perceived boundaries. Current projects include Prophets, Sounds Like Movement, and Music Yared as well as facilitating Art Day South, an inclusive arts studio with Arts Access Victoria.
Damiano Bertoli was an artist and writer who worked across drawing, theatre, video, prints, installation and sculpture. With works of great humour and intelligence, Bertoli was best known for his ongoing series Continuous Moment, which sprawled a range of mediums across multiple works, ultimately circulating on time itself. His practice gravitated toward aesthetic and cultural moments, particularly related to his birth year of 1969.
Daniel Green is an artist and performer. His practice explores the objects and media we use to occupy our time, and how they are used to give our lives meaning. Daniel’s work has been exhibited within Campbelltown Arts Centre, Pelt, Artspace and BUS Projects, and has performed at Electrofringe, The Now Now Festival, Liquid Architecture, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and Cafe OTO in London. He lives and works in London.
Daniel Jenatsch makes interdisciplinary works that explore the interstices between affect and information. His work combines hyper-detailed soundscapes, music and video to create multimedia documentaries, installations, radio pieces, and performances. He is the winner of the 2020 John Fries award. His works have been presented in exhibitions and programs at ACCA, UNSW, Arts House, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, the Athens Biennale, NextWave Festival, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Liquid Architecture Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the MousonTurm, Frankfurt.
Danni Zuvela is a curator and writer based in Melbourne and the Gold Coast. Her research is informed by interests in feminism, activism, ecology, language and performance. With Joel Stern, Danni has led Liquid Architecture as Artistic Director, and continues to develop curatorial projects for the organisation.
Debris Facility Pty Ltd is a para-corporate entity who engages im/material contexts with the view to highlight and disrupt administrative forms and their embedded power relations. Deploying print, design, installation, and wearables as the most visible parts of operations, they also work in experimental pedagogy and perforated performance of labour. They are a white-settler parasite with theft and dispossession as the implicated ground from which they work. They currently hold contracts with Liquid Architecture, Victorian College of the Arts, Monash University and Debris Facility Pty Ltd.
Denise Helene Sumi is art historian, author and professionally involved in culture.
Diego Ramirez makes art, writes about culture, and labours in the arts. In 2018, he showed his video work in a solo screening by ACCA x ACMI and he performed in Lifenessless at West Space x Gertrude Contemporary in 2019. His work has been shown locally and internationally at MARS Gallery, ACMI, Westspace, Torrance Art Museum, Hong-Gah Museum, Careof Milan, Buxton Cotntemporary, WRO Media Art Biennale, Human Resources LA, Art Central HK, Sydney Contemporary, and Deslave. His words feature in Art and Australia, NECSUS, un Projects, Runway Journal, Art Collector, and Australian Book Review. He is represented by MARS Gallery, Editor-at-large at Running Dog and Gallery Manager at SEVENTH.
Dimitri Troaditis works in the Greek-Australian media. As a poet he has been extensively published in Greece and in Australia in numerous literary journals, websites, blogs and anthologies. He has published six poetry collections and two social history books so far. He has organised poetry readings in Melbourne for years and translates others’ poetry. He runs poetry website To Koskino and was a resident of Coburg for 19 years.
Douglas Kahn is an historian and theorist of energies in the arts, sound in the arts and sound studies, and media arts, from the late-nineteenth century to the present. He lives on unceded Dharug and Gundungurra land. His books include Energies in the Arts (MIT Press, 2019); Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013); Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999); Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Arts, edited with Hannah Higgins (University of California Press, 2012); and Source: Music of the Avant-garde, edited with Larry Austin (University of California Press, 2011).
Dr. Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Internationally Known Private Ear
Serving Industries of Culture Since 2007
Licensed & Bonded: Goldsmiths College, University of London
Civil | Criminal | Human | Marital | Theological | Supernatural
Bureaus: Beirut, Berlin, Dubai, London
Dylan Martorell is an artist and musician based in Narrm/Melbourne Victoria. He is a founding member of Slow Art Collective, Snawklor, Hi God People, and Forum of Sensory Motion. He has performed and exhibited internationally, including projects with; Art Dubai, Asian Art Biennale, Tarrawarra Biennale, Jakarta Biennale and Kochi Muzirus Biennale. His work often combines site-specific materiality and music to create temporary sites for improvised community engagement.
Dylan Robinson is a xwélméxw (Stó:lō) writer, artist, scholar and curator, He is Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts, and associate professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He is author of Hungry Listening, Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, published by University of Minnesota Press.
Elena Biserna is a scholar and independent curator based in Marseille (France), working at the intersection of social, political and public spheres.
Eloise Sweetman loves art, misses her home in Western Australia, all the time loving Rotterdam where she became friends with Pris Roos whose artwork Sweetman speaks of. Sweetman is a curator, artist, writer and teacher working in intimacy, not knowing and material relation. She started Shimmer with Dutch-Australian artist Jason Hendrik Hansma in 2017.
Author of Hearing the Cloud (Zero Books), Emile Frankel is a writer and composer researching the changing conditions of online listening. In his spare time he runs the science fiction and critical fantasy publisher Formling.
Curious about the tender intersections between art, life and friendships, Emma Nixon is an emerging curator and writer. In 2018 she completed a Bachelor of Art History and Curating at Monash University and co-founded Cathedral Cabinet ARI in the Nicholas Building. In Melbourne she has curated and written about exhibitions that investigate subjects such as abstraction, the domestic, care and collage within contemporary art.
Emma Ramsay is active across experimental dance and DIY music; sound performance; and other text collaborations. She works in community media and archives.
Emma Russell is a critical carceral studies scholar and senior lecturer in crime, justice and legal studies at La Trobe University, Australia. She researches and writes on policing and criminalisation, prisons, detention, and activism. Emma is the author of Queer Histories and the Politics of Policing (2020) and co-author of Resisting Carceral Violence: Women’s Imprisonment and the Politics of Abolition (2018).
Eric Avery is a Ngiyampaa, Yuin, Bandjalang and Gumbangirr artist. As part of his practice Eric plays the violin, dances and composes music. Working with his family’s custodial songs he seeks to revive and continue on an age old legacy – continuing the tradition of singing in his tribe – utilising his talents to combine and create an experience of his peoples culture.
Ernie Althoff
Ernie Althoff has been making experimental music since the late 1970s, and is well-known for his work. Throughout this period he has always remained true to his exploratory ideals.
Fayen d’Evie is an artist and writer, based in Muckleford, Australia. Her projects are often conversational and collaborative, and resist spectatorship by inviting audiences into sensorial readings of artworks. Fayen advocates the radical potential for blindness, arguing that blindness offers critical positions and methods attuned to sensory translations, ephemerality, the tangible and the intangible, concealment, uncertainty, the precarious, and the invisible. With artist Katie West, Fayen co-founded the Museum Incognita, which revisits neglected or obscured histories through scores that activate embodied readings. Fayen is also the founder of 3-ply, which investigates artist-led publishing as an experimental site for the creation, dispersal, translation, and archiving of texts.
Fileona Dkhar is an Indigenous Khasi visual artist based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Shillong, India. Her work entwines the personal with mythology and history as storytelling devices.
Fjorn Bastos is an artist, researcher, and event organiser. As an artist, she works primarily in sound and performance under the name Papaphilia. As a researcher, she interrogates how biological discourses are used in neoliberal/colonial governance structures to shape the political. Fjorn's research informs her writing on sound-poetics and the challenges this framework poses to anglophone notions of property. She is also co-director of Future Tense and co-curator of Writing and Concepts.
Frances Barrett is an artist who lives and works on Kaurna land in Tarntanya/Adelaide. Frances is currently Lecturer in Contemporary Art at University of South Australia.
Francis Carmody’s artistic practice serves as a useful alibi to reach out to people he admires across disciplines and technical capabilities to share stories and complete projects. Through tracing networks and natural structures, he would like to get to the bottom of what the hell is going on.
This process of enquiry draws on meticulous research, cold calling, persistence and frequent rejection. Creating an ever-expanding list of Project Partners.
Francis Plagne is a musician and writer. He has written about contemporary art for several major Australian publications and institutions. His musical work integrates idiosyncratic forms of songwriting with a variety of other approaches, including group improvisation, instrumental miniatures, and domestic musique concrète. He has been performing live regularly since 2005 and has released recordings on labels such as Black Truffle, Horn of Plenty, Kye Records, Penultimate Press and his own Mould Museum micro-label.
Freya Schack-Arnott is an Australian/Danish cellist who enjoys a multi-faceted career as a soloist and ensemble performer of classical and contemporary repertoire, curator and improviser within experimental music, electronics, popular and cross-disciplinary art forms. Schack-Arnott regularly performs with Australia's leading new music ensembles, including ELISION Ensemble (as core member) and Ensemble Offspring. Her curatorial roles include co-curator/founder of the regular 'Opus Now' music series and previous curator of the NOW Now festival and Rosenberg Museum.
Geoff Robinson is a Melbourne-based artist working on Wurundjeri country. Robinson creates event-based artworks that utilise the temporal qualities of sound and performance and the spatial conditions of physical sites to unravel the durational layers of place. Robinson has presented projects with Titanik, Turku; Bus Projects, Melbourne; Liquid Architecture, Melbourne; and MoKS, Mooste, Estonia. He was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture 2014 and completed the PhD project Durational Situation at MADA, Monash University, Melbourne, 2018.
Georgia Hutchison is a cultural development practitioner and arts executive in Naarm/Melbourne, and Executive Director/CEO of Liquid Architecture. Her practice as an artist, educator, organiser and strategist crosses contemporary art, music, design and social justice.
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian writer, journalist and critic based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work has been published widely in media and literary publications including The Age, The Guardian, Meanjin and Sydney Review of Books.
Gooooose (Han Han) is an electronic music producer, visual artist and software developer based in Shanghai, China. His current releases include They (D Force, 2017), Dong 1 (D Force, 2018), Pro Rata (ANTE-RASA, 2019). Gooooose's 2019 SVBKVLT–released RUSTED SILICON received positive reviews from media including boomkat, Resident Advisor, Dusted Magazine, and The Wire. Gooooose has performed live at CTM (Berlin, 2018), Nyege Nyege (Kampala, 2019), Soft Centre (Sydney, 2019), Unsound (Kraków, 2019) and Recombinant (San Francisco, 2019).
Hannan Jones is an artist working at the intersections of sound, installation, performance and moving image.
Han Reardon-Smith (they/them) is a white settler of Welsh and Turkish heritage and is a musicker, radio/podcast producer, community organiser, and thinker-scholar.
Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, director, and the author of four collections of poetry, Negro League Baseball, Go Find Your Father/A Famous Blues, Hollywood Forever, and A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom. She lives in New York and Los Angeles.
Haroon Mirza is an artist who intertwines his practice with the role of composer. Mirza considers electricity his main medium and creates atmospheric environments through the linking together of light, sound, music, videos and elements of architecture. Regularly showing internationally in group and solo exhibitions, Mirza’s work has also been included in the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China (2012) and the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011), where he was awarded the Silver Lion.
Holly Childs is an artist and writer. Her research involves filtering stories of computation through frames of ecology, earth, memory, poetry, and light. She is the author of two books: No Limit (Hologram, Melbourne) and Danklands (Arcadia Missa, London), and she collaborates with Gediminas Žygus on ‘Hydrangea’. She is currently writing her third book, What Causes Flowers Not to Bloom?.
Holly Herndon experiments at the outer reaches of dance music and pop. Born in Tennessee, Herndon spent her formative years in Berlin’s techno scene and repatriated to San Francisco, where she completed her PhD at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Her albums include Platform (2015) and Proto (2019).
Iliass Saoud was born in Halba, Lebanon in 1960 as the sixth of eight children of Wakim and Nadima Saoud. Escaping the Lebanese Civil War in 1977, Iliass migrated to Canada pursued a BA in Mathematics from Dalhouse University in 1982. In 1987 he married Janice Joseph (Fakhry) before settling in Australia to raise his family in 1997, owning a variety of small businesses including the Gaffney Street post office across from the Lincoln Mill’s Centre in Coburg from 2005-2011. Currently, Iliass works part time at a local newsagency and is an avid Bridge player and a dedicated grandfather of one.
The Convoy conjure illustrious soundscapes from the abyss of chaos, revealing hidden worlds of the imagination as the performance takes form and infuses with subjective experience. Using instruments of sound, light and smell, The Convoy enchant space with themes of tension, evolution, entropy and regeneration. Sensorial immersion transports audiences through highly dynamic environments that shift and blend into one single, breathing moment. As entity, rather than singular, Immy Chuah is a guest within The Convoy on unceded land.
Isabella Trimboli is a critic, essayist, editor, and publisher based in Melbourne, Australia. Her essays and criticism have been published widely, for publications including Metrograph Journal, The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, The Guardian, and The Sydney Reviews of Books. She is a 2023 recipient of a Seventh Gallery residency and is the co-founding editor of feminist music journal Gusher.
Isha Ram Das is a composer and sound artist primarily concerned with ecologies of environment and culture. He works with experimental sound techniques to produce performances, installations and recordings. He was the 2019 recipient of the Lionel Gell Award for Composition, and has scored feature-length films and nationally-touring theatre installations. He has performed at institutions such as the Sydney Opera House; Black Dot Gallery, Melbourne; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Metro Arts, Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and Boxcopy, Brisbane.
Ivan Cheng's recent works are context specific situations, dealing with language and driven by relations with collaborators and hosts. His background as a performer and musician form the basis for using performance as a critical medium. Invested in questions around publics and accessibility, he produces videos, objects, paintings and publications as anchors for the staging of complex and precarious spectacles. His work is presented internationally, and he has initiated project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam since 2017.
Ivy Alvarez’s poetry collections include The Everyday English Dictionary, Disturbance, and Mortal. Her latest is Diaspora: Volume L (Paloma Press, 2019). A Fellow of MacDowell Colony (US), and Hawthornden (UK), her work is widely published and anthologised (twice in Best Australian Poems), with poems translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Born in the Philippines and raised in Australia, she lived in Wales for almost a decade, before arriving in New Zealand in 2014.
Jacqui Shelton is an artist and writer born on Barada Barna land, central QLD, and based in Narrm, Melbourne. Her work uses text, performance, film-making and photography to explore the complications of performance and presence, and how voice, language, and image can collaborate or undermine one another. She is especially interested in how emotion and embodied experience can be made public and activated to reveal a complex politics of living-together, and the tensions this makes visible. She has produced exhibitions and performance works in association with institutions including Gertrude Contemporary, the Institute of Modern Art, West Space, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Tarrawarra Museum, and with Channels Festival and Liquid Architecture. Shelton has shown work internationally in Milan at Care-Of, and at NARS Inc in New York City. She teaches photography at Monash University and in the Masters of Media program at RMIT, and holds a PhD from Monash University.
Jamal Nabulsi (he/him) is a Palestinian diaspora activist, writer, scholar, thinker, and rap musician.
James Hazel is a composer/artist/researcher based on the unceded Gadigal land of the Eora Nation. As someone who lived in an underclass (social-housing) community for fourteen years, James employs extended score practices across sound, music, utterance, and (re)performance to interrogate what it means to live, love, and listen under precarity – stemming from both lived/researched experiences of poverty. As an advocate in this area, James has commissioned several artists from low-SES backgrounds through ADSR Zine.
In recent years, James has 'worked' for the dole; various call centres; and, more recently, as a casual academic in musicology at USYD. In 2021, James was selected as one of the ABC Top 5 Researchers (Arts).
James Parker is an academic at Melbourne Law School and long-time associate curator with Liquid Architecture. His work explores the many relations between law, sound and listening. He is currently working on machine listening with Joel Stern and Sean Dockray.
James Rushford is an Australian composer-performer who holds a doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts, and was a 2018 fellow at Academy Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. His work is drawn from a familiarity with specific concrète, improvised, avant-garde and collagist languages. Currently, his work deals with the aesthetic concept of musical shadow. James has been commissioned as a composer by ensembles including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Glasgow), and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and regularly performs in Australia and internationally.
Jannah Quill’s deconstructive exploration of electronic instruments and technologies manifests in electronic music production and experimental audio-visual performance and installation. Jannah modifies existing technologies (such as solar panels) into innovative light-to-audio systems, used with software/hardware experimentation and modular synthesis to carve a distinct voice in electronic music and art.
Jared Davis is a writer and curator based in London with an interest in independent music, sound culture, and its politics. He is Associate Editor of AQNB and co-host of the editorial platform’s Artist Statement podcast.
Jasmine Guffond is an artist and composer working at the interface of social, political, and technical infrastructures. Focused on electronic composition across music and art contexts her practice spans live performance, recording, installation and custom made browser add-ons. Through the sonification of data she addresses the potential of sound to engage with contemporary political questions and engages listening as a situated-knowledge practice.
Jason De Santolo (Garrwa and Barunggam) is a researcher & creative producer based in the School of Design, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. He has worked with his own communities as an activist and advocate using film and performance, protest and education to bring attention to injustices and design solutions using Indigenous knowledge.
Jazmina Figueroa initiated the nineteenth call for Web Residencies and the collaboration between Digital Solitude and Liquid Architecture. Figueroa is a writer and performer.
Jen Callaway is a Melbourne musician, sound and performance artist, photographer, and community services worker raised in various parts of Tasmania. Current projects include bands Is There a Hotline?, Propolis, Snacks and Hi God People; and upcoming film Here at the End, by Campbell Walker, as actor/co-writer.
Jessica Aszodi is an Australian-born, London-based vocalist who has premiered many new pieces, performed work that has lain dormant for centuries, and sung roles ranging from standard operatic repertoire to artistic collaborations. She has been a soloist with ensembles including ICE; the Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras; and San Diego and Chicago Symphony Orchestras’ chamber series. Aszodi can be heard on numerous recordings and has sung in festivals around the world. She holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the Queensland Conservatorium, an MFA from the University of California, and is co-director of the Resonant Bodies Festival (Australia), and artistic associate of BIFEM.
Jessie Scott is a practising video artist, writer, programmer and producer who works across the spectrum of screen culture in Melbourne. She is a founding member of audiovisual art collective Tape Projects, and co-directed and founded the inaugural Channels Video Art Festival in 2013.
Jim Denley is one of Australia's foremost improvisers. Over a career spanning four decades his work has emphasised the use of recording technologies, co-creation, and a concern with site-specificity.
Joee Mejias is a musician and video artist from Manila. She is co-producer of WSK, the first and only international festival of digital arts and new media in the Philippines and co-founder of HERESY, a new platform for women in sound and multimedia. She performs as Joee & I: her avant-pop electronica solo project.
Joel Sherwood Spring is a Wiradjuri man raised between Redfern and Alice Springs who works across research, activism, architecture, installation and speculative projects. At present, his work focuses on the contested narratives of Sydney’s and Australia’s urban culture and indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation.
Joel Stern is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School of Media and Communication at RMIT, and an Associate Editor at Disclaimer. With a background in experimental music, Stern’s work — spanning research, curation, and art — focuses on practices of sound and listening and how these shape our contemporary worlds. From 2013-2022 he was the Artistic Director of Liquid Architecture.
Berlin-based composer-performer Johnny Chang engages in extended explorations surrounding the relationships of sound/listening and the in-between areas of improvisation, composition and performance. Johnny is part of the Wandelweiser composers collective and currently collaborates with: Catherine Lamb (Viola Torros project), Mike Majkowski (illogical harmonies), Phill Niblock, Samuel Dunscombe, Derek Shirley and others.
Jolyon Jones is a Berlin-based student of fine arts at the University of Arts Berlin. He works primarily between sculpture, drawing, print media and sound. With an interest in practices of labour, Jolyon draws upon his background in anthropology exploring embedded concepts through research and architecture and the latent possibilities of everyday materials such as concrete, graphite, and silicone to access speculative narratives and the construction of mementos.
Jon Watts is a Melbourne/Naarm based musician, designer, 3D artist and animator. His music has been released through cult labels SUMAC and Butter Sessions, and he is currently Senior Multimedia Installer at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Josten Myburgh is a musician based on Whadjuk Noongar boodja country who plays with techniques from the worlds of electro-acoustic music, radio art, free improvisation, field recording and experimental composition. He co-directs exploratory music label Tone List and the Audible Edge festival. He has performed in South Africa, the United States, and throughout South East Asia, Europe and Australia. He is a Schenberg Fellow and a student of Antoine Beuger and Michael Pisaro.
Joy Zhou is a China born emerging artist and design practitioner based in Naarm/Melbourne. Informed by their background in Interior Design, Joy’s practice entails gestures of queering which unfold encounters and events that draw relationships between people, places, and spaces.
Julius Killerby is an artist living and working in London. His work focuses on the psychological ripple effects of certain cultural and societal transformations. Part of Julius’ practice also includes portraiture, and in 2017 he was nominated as a finalist in the Archibald Prize for his portrait of Paul Little. His work has been exhibited at VCA Art Space, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of Ballarat, and Geelong Gallery.
Katie West is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives on Noongar Ballardong boodja and belongs to the Yindjibarndi people of the Pilbara tablelands in Western Australia. The process and notion of naturally dyeing fabric underpin her practice – the rhythm of walking, gathering, bundling, boiling up water and infusing materials with plant matter. The objects, installations and happenings that Katie creates invite attention to the ways we weave our stories, places, histories, and futures.
Kaz Therese (they/them) grew up on Darug land in Mt Druitt, Western Sydney. They are an interdisciplinary artist and cultural leader with a practice grounded in performance, activism and community building. Their work is inspired by place and narrative from working class & underclass settings. From 2013- 2020 they were the Artistic Director of PYT Fairfield. Kaz directed the Helpmann nominated PLAYLIST (premiered 2018), UnWrapped, Sydney Opera House (2019) Other works include TRIBUNAL presented at Griffin Theatre, ArtsHouse Melbourne, Sydney Opera House, Sydney Festival; WOMEN OF FAIRFIELD with MCA C3West and STARTTS, winning the Sydney Myer Arts & Cultural Award for Best Arts Program (2016).Kaz is founder of FUNPARK ,Mt Druitt (Sydney Festival 2014) and a graduate of the 2019 Australia Council Cultural Leadership program.
Kengné Téguia is a Black Deaf HIV+ cyborg artist, who works from sound deafinitely. #TheBLACKRevolutionwillbeDEAFinitelyLoud
Kenneth Constance Loe (he/they) is an artist, writer, and performer from Singapore, and currently based in Vienna, Austria.
kirby is a fledgling. They garden, listen, and learn in Wurundjeri Country. kirby’s ecological listening project Local Time combines field recording and experimental web development to explore more-than-human neighborhood entanglements.
Kt Spit (Katie Collins) is an artist and musician based in Narrm (Melbourne). Lyrically and visually her work explores subcultural narratives and challenges dominant representations of loss, grief, and true love. In 2015 Kt independently released her debut album, Combluotion, and in 2019 will release a visual album entitled Kill the King.
Kynan Tan is an artist interested in the relations and conditions of computational systems, with a focus on data, algorithm, networks, materiality, control, and affect. These areas are explored using computer-generated artworks that take the form of simulations, video, sound, 3d prints, text, code, and generative algorithms.
Las Chinas is the cosmic coincidences led to the meeting of Chileans Sarita Gálvez and Camila Marambio in Melbourne. Their shared reverence for the ancestral flautón chino from the Andes Mountains lead to playful explorations of its unique dissonant sounds and thereafter to experimenting with atonal signing and other technologies of the spirit.
Influenced by Chilean feminist poet Cecilia Vicuña, the now deceased poet Fidel Sepúlveda, the musical ensemble La Chimuchina and the chino bands from the townships of La Canela and Andacollo, Las Chinas honours the ancestral tradition by enacting the principle of tearing each other apart.
Laura McLean is a curator, writer, and researcher based in Naarm Melbourne. She is an Associate Curator at Liquid Architecture, member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), and is currently undertaking a PhD in Curatorial Practice at MADA, Monash University. Past curatorial projects include CIVICS, Maroondah Federation Estate Gallery, Melbourne (2020); Startup States, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi (2019); and Contingent Movements Archive, Maldives Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale (2013). Her writing is included in edited books published by Arena, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and the MIT Press, among others, and has been published by journals including Eyeline, Realtime, HKW Technosphere Magazine, and ArtAsiaPacific.
Originally from the Gulf of Carpentaria, Laurie May has made home here in the desert in Mparntwe. With Aboriginal ancestry from Central Queensland from her father and New Zealand heritage from her ma they have the saltwater, the red dirt and long white cloud in their veins. Embracing trauma and a troubled youth to bring you anti-capitalist poetry that makes you think. Laurie is also the Festival Director for the Red Dirt Poetry Festival and an award winning event producer.
Leighton Craig is an artist living in Meanjin/Brisbane. He has been in a number of bands (The Lost Domain, G55, The Deadnotes et al) and is currently a member of the duo Primitive Motion with Sandra Selig.
Liang Luscombe is a Naarm/Melbourne-based visual artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture and moving image that engage in a process of generative questioning of how media and film affect audiences.
Lin Chi-Wei is a legend of Taiwanese sonic art, whose practice incorporates folklore culture, noise, ritual, and audience participation.
Lisa Lerkenfeldt is a multi-disciplinary artist working in sound, gesture and performance. Central to her practice is languages of improvisation and intimacy with technology. Traces of a personal discipline and form of graphic notation are introduced in the online exhibition 14 Gestures. The associated recorded work Collagen (Shelter Press, 2020) disrupts the role of the common hair comb through gesture and sound.
Lucreccia Quintailla is a multidisciplinary artist, DJ, educator, co-director of Liquid Architecture, and a sound system operator. She is interested in sound and collectivity and collaboration.
Luisa Lana was born in Australia in 1953. Her mother Nannina had arrived in Australia in 1950 with a 3 month old son, and worked for many years on the sewing room floors and her father Angelo worked on the docks where he helped unionise the Italian workforce. Luisa and her brother were latchkey kids, as they looked after themselves in the morning and ran the ‘Continental’ deli in the evenings. Luisa attained a teaching degree, then a postgrad in Social Sciences, and twice studied Italian at The University for Foreigners in Perugia, Italy. Luisa married Luigino Lana, a Venetian migrant who operated a mechanic business in Brunswick for over 30 years. She devoted her life to being an educator and a mother, teaching Italian to English speakers and English to generations of migrants from around the world. Currently Luisa is translating her father's memoirs from Italian to English, and enjoying being a Nonna.
Luke Conroy is a Tasmanian multidisciplinary artist currently based in The Netherlands. With a background in sociology and arts education, Luke’s artistic practice engages with socio-cultural topics in meaningful yet playful ways, utilising humour and irony as essential tools for critical reflection and expression. The outcome of his work utilises an ever-evolving multimedia and audio-visual practice which includes photography, digital-art, video, sound, VR, textile, text, and installation.
Lu Yang (b. Shanghai, China) is a multimedia artist based in Shanghai. Mortality, androgyny, hysteria, existentialism and spiritual neurology feed Lu’s jarring and at times morbid fantasies. Also taking inspiration and resources from Anime, gaming and Sci-fi subcultures, Lu explores his fantasies through mediums including 3D animation, immersive video game installation, holographic, live performances, virtual reality, and computer programming. Lu has collaborated with scientists, psychologists, performers, designers, experimental composers, Pop Music producers, robotics labs, and celebrities throughout his practice.
Lu Yang has held exhibitions at UCCA (Beijing), MWoods (Beijing), Cc Foundation (Shanghai), Spiral (Tokyo), Fukuoka Museum of Asian Art (Fukuoka, Japan), Société (Berlin), MOCA Cleveland (Cleveland, Ohio). He has participated in several international biennials and triennials such as 2021 Asia Society Triennial (New York), 2012 & 2018 Shanghai Biennial, 2018 Athens Biennale, 2016 Liverpool Biennial, 2016 International Digital Art Biennale (Montreal), Chinese Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale, and 2014 Fukuoka Triennial. In 2020, Lu Yang was included in Centre Pompidou’s exhibition Neurons, simulated intelligence in Paris. In 2019, Lu was the winner of the 8th BMW Art Journey and started the Yang Digital Incarnation project.
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Mandy Nicholson is a Wurundjeri-willam (Wurundjeri-baluk patriline) artist and Traditional Custodian of Melbourne and surrounds. Mandy also has connections to the Dja Dja wurrung and Ngurai illam wurrung language groups of the Central/Eastern Kulin Nation. Mandy gained a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Aboriginal Archaeology in 2011, worked for the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages for six years and is now a PhD candidate studying how Aboriginal people connect to Country, Off Country.
Mara Schwerdtfeger is a composer / curator / audio producer based in Eora / Sydney. She plays the viola and collaborates with her laptop to create live performances and recorded pieces for film, dance, and gallery spaces.
Maria Moles is an Australian drummer, composer and producer based in Narrm/Melbourne.
Martina Becherucci graduated in Cultural Heritage at the University of Milan and is currently completing her studies with a Master degree in Economics and Management of Arts and Cultural Activities at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Martina loves being in contact with visitors in museums and galleries, during temporary exhibitions and cultural events.
Martyn Reyes is a Filipino-Australian writer and artist based in Madrid. His work can be found in the Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings, SBS Voices, LIMINAL Magazine and more. He is currently working on a book-length project.
Mat Dryhurst is an artist who releases music and artworks solo and in conjunction with Holly Herndon and the record label PAN. Dryhurst developed the decentralised publishing framework Saga, which enables creators to claim ownership of each space in which their work appears online, and a number of audio plays that derive their narrative from the personal information of listeners. He lectures on issues of music, technology, and ideology at NYU, and advises the blockchain-based platform co-operative Resonate.is.
Mat Spisbah is a New Media curator with a unique portfolio of programming that seeks to integrate non-traditional artistic methods and emerging technologies. Having lived in Hong Kong for 14 years, he is connected to the region’s art and culture, and has created professional networks with artists, curators, galleries, promoters and industry professionals across Australasia. Portfolio highlights include the debut Australian performances of north Asian artists including: Howie Lee, Rui Ho, Meuko Meuko, Pan Daijing, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Tzusing, and Gabber Modus Operandi.
Mattin is a cross disciplinary artist working with noise, improvisation and dissonance. His work Social Dissonance was presented at documenta 14 in 2017 in Kassel and Athens.
Megan Alice Clune shifts between musician, composer and artist. Primarily, her work explores both the concept and aesthetics of ambient music through sound installation, collaboration and performance. Megan is the founding member of the Alaska Orchestra, and has presented work and undertaken residencies across Australia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival (MA), Next Wave Festival, Underbelly Arts Festival, Performa 15 (NYC) and VividLIVE at the Sydney Opera House.
Megan Cope is a Quandamooka woman (North Stradbroke Island) in South East Queensland. Her site-specific sculptural installations, video work and paintings investigate issues relating to identity, the environment and mapping practices. Cope’s work often resists prescribed notions of Aboriginality and becomes psychogeographies across various material outcomes that challenge the grand narrative of ‘Australia’ as well as our sense of time and ownership in a settler colonial state.
Mehak Sawhney is a scholar, curator, and activist with research interests in sound and media cultures of South Asia. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Communication Studies at McGill University. Funded by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, her doctoral project explores audio and targeted state surveillance in postcolonial India. She has also been associated with Sarai-CSDS in Delhi since 2017. Previously, her ethnographic work has studied urban sound and listening cultures as well as the politics of machine listening and voice interfaces in contemporary India. Her academic and public writing has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Amodern, and The Wire, among others.
Melissa Johnson is Associate Professor of Art History & Visual Culture at Illinois State University (Normal, IL). Her scholarly research focuses on the histories of craft and its intersections with modern and contemporary art. She is currently working on a project that explores artists making work in response to the writings of Virginia Woolf. She’s deeply interested in situating her academic writing and her textile-based work as parallel practices, and is working on two writing and textile projects, “Woolf Words” and “Haptic Investigations,” and a project on mending and repair.
Michael Terren is a musician and educator from Boorloo/Perth. Grounded in experimental studio-based practice, his work explores the social construction of the technologies of music’s creation and distribution. He is a sessional academic teaching music at two Boorloo universities, and in 2019 finished a PhD thesis entitled 'The grain of the digital audio workstation'.
Michiko Ogawa is a performer-composer specialising in the clarinet, born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She performs not only classical repertoire but also contemporary and experimental music, including free improvisation and film soundtrack work. In 2019 she was awarded a doctorate (DMA) from the University of California San Diego, with a dissertation focusing on the film music of Teiji Ito. She is in the beginning stages of writing a biography of Ito’s life.
Mitch L Ryan is a writer whose work explores histories of countercultures, music, media, and politics.
Moritz Nahold is a Vienna-based sound artist and composer.
MP Hopkins is an artist working on Gadigal and Wangal land in Sydney, Australia that makes audio, performance, radiophonic, and textual works. He uses voice, feedback, recording/playback devices, and verbal notation within different acoustic environments, which are deconstructed and presented to the listener in delicate and degraded ways. Hopkins has released recordings with Penultimate Press, Canti Magnetici, Tahalamos, Mappa Editions and Regional Bears. He has presented projects for the NOW now, Liquid Architecture, Avantwhatever, and The Make It Up Club. International appearances include Café Oto, UK; LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore; Les Ateliers Claus, Belgium; TUSK Festival, UK; Colour Out of Space Festival, UK; and he has produced radiophonic works for Radiophrenia, Kunstradio, and the Radia network.
MSHR is an art collective that builds and explores sculptural electronic systems. Their practice is a self-transforming entity with its outputs patched into its inputs, expressing its form through interactive installations, virtual environments and live improvisations. MSHR was established in 2011 in Portland, Oregon by Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper. Their name is a modular acronym, designed to hold varied ideas over time.
Myriad Sun are an experimental audio/visual/rap trio from Walyalup (Fremantle), Australia, composed of electronic producer Ben Aguero, Mc POW! Negro, and Limit Bashr. Additional performers: Mali Jose, Billy Jack Narkle and Polly-Pearl Greenhalgh.
Natasha Tontey is an artist and graphic designer based in Yogyakarta. She is interested in exploring the concept of fiction as a method of speculative thinking. Through her artistic practice she investigates the idea of how fear, horror, and terror could be manifested in order to control the public and how fictional accounts of the history and myth surrounding ‘manufactured fear’ might operate as a method of speculative fiction that determines expectations for the future.
Dr. Nat Grant is a sound artist and producer working on unceded Wurundjeri country with more than 15 years experience across live performance, broadcast, digital arts, and community arts. Nat is a drummer, percussionist, and composer whose work focuses on long-form musical compositions, performance events and installations using traditional and graphic notation as well as improvisation. They also occasionally write words instead of music.
Nathan Gray is an artist whose recent works use voice as their medium, taking form as lecture-performances, radio-plays and documentaries, DJ sets, narrative and rumour.
Neil Morris is a Yorta Yorta, Dja Dja Wurrung man. He is well known in Narrm/Birraranga for his musical project DRMNGNOW, a project built on subject matter tackling the colonial nature of the Australian construct and how that affects contemporary society upon this land. The work is unapologetic, clear, and deeply poetic. It hints toward Morris's extensive experience as a spoken word artist in Narrm since 2015. Morris's work is triumphant in the face of severe adversity often imbued in a quite fortified melancholy, a powerful marker of the survival of First Nations peoples in the now.
Nick Ashwood is a guitarist, composer, improviser and performer from Nipaluna/Tasmania now residing in Sydney. His focuses have been exploring deep listening, harmonic space and the possibilities of the steel-string acoustic guitar by means of preparations, just intonation, objects and bowing.
Nico Niquo, a.k.a Nico Callaghan, works and lives in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Since 2015, he has produced and released music under a variety of monikers with the North American label Orange Milk Records and Australian label Daisart. He has performed across Australia, East Asia, and Europe.
Noah Simblist works as a curator, writer, and artist with a focus on art and politics, specifically the ways in which contemporary artists address history. He has contributed to Art in America, Terremoto, Art Journal and other publications.
He is also an Associate Professor of Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Noemie Cecilia Huttner-Koros is a queer Jewish performance-maker, writer, dramaturg, poet, teaching artist and community organiser living and working on Whadjuk Noongar country in Boorloo (Perth). Her practice is driven by a deep belief in the social, political and communal role of art and performance and in engaging with sites and histories where queer culture, composting and ecological crisis occur.
Oren Ambarchi is an Australian multi-instrumentalist whose practice focuses on the exploration of the guitar. He is a prolific solo artist and consummate collaborator who has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists over the last three decades including; Fennesz, Charlemagne Palestine, Sunn 0)), crys cole, Thomas Brinkmann, Keiji Haino, Alvin Lucier, John Zorn, Annea Lockwood, Alvin Curran, Loren Connors, Manuel Gottsching/Ash Ra, Merzbow, Jim O'Rourke, Keith Rowe, David Rosenboom, Akio Suzuki, Phill Niblock, John Tilbury, Richard Pinhas, Evan Parker, Fire! and many more. He has released numerous recordings over the years for labels such as Touch, Editions Mego, Drag City, PAN, Kranky, Staubgold and Tzadik. Since 2009, Ambarchi has run the Black Truffle record label.
Ambarchi's latest album Shebang is released via US label Drag City.
Pan-Pan Kolektiva was established in March 2020, as a research group on listening. Pan-Pan is a standard emergency call based on the acronym Pan which stands for Pay Attention Now.
Patrick Hase is a digital media artist and researcher, focusing on work that often involves digital interfaces, experimental web design, and collaborative a/v. The entwined practical and theoretical aspects of his work are interested in exploring the embedded cultural and emotional impacts of how people are extended into the virtual via digital processes and designs.
Penelope Cain is interested in landscape in its widest definition, from the extracted, transformed and occupied landscapes of the Anthropocene, to the emergent Post-Carbon.
Her art practice is located interstitially between scientific knowledge and unearthing connected and untold narratives in the world. She works across media and knowledge streams, with scientists, datasets, people, stories, and land, to connect yet to be heard storytellings from the present and near future. She was awarded the Fauvette Loureiro Travelling Scholarship, Glenfiddich Contemporary Art Residency and is currently undertaking a one year S+T+ARTS residency in the Hague, for Rewild, Maxxi, Rome.
Philip Brophy writes on music, among other things.
Poppy de Souza is a Meanjin (Brisbane) based researcher affiliated with Griffith University and UNSW. Her work focuses on the politics of voice and listening—broadly defined—in conditions of inequality and injustice, including the relationship between sound, race, and conditions of (not) being heard. Poppy has previously worked in community arts and cultural development (CACD), and with the national Film and Sound Archive as a curator on australianscreen.
Pris Roos grew up in Rhenen, the Netherlands. Her family migrated from Bogor, Indonesia, to start their own toko in the Netherlands. Toko is the Indonesian word for shop, and they sell non-Western food (products). Roos grew up in the toko, a space of being together, and full of colours, smells, food, stories and images of immigrants. The toko is a source of inspiration for her artistic practices. Stories that are normally not heard find their way in her works. Roos makes portraits of immigrants that she meets in the toko, on the streets or in her surroundings of the South of Rotterdam. She visits them at home or invites them to her atelier. The stories are translated into painted portraits, videos, installations and spoken word performances.
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. His work ranges from chamber music to experimental noise, to large scale installations, produced solo and with the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity. At California Institute of the Arts, Chacon studied with James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, Michael Pisaro and Wadada Leo Smith developing a compositional language steeped in both the modernist avant-garde and Indigenous cosmologies and subjectivities. He has written for ensembles, musicians and non-musicians, and for social and educational situations, and toured the world as a noise artist.
Rhianna Patrick is a freelance Torres Strait Islander journalist, broadcaster and audio content creator with 25 years' experience as a media professional. She's worked across news, tv documentaries, national radio programming and podcasting. Her work has been featured in Kill Your Darlings, NME Australia, Guardian Australia, The Australian Music Vault, The Stoop podcast and IndigenousX.
Robin Fox is an Australian audio-visual artist. His AV laser works, which synchronise sound and visual electricity in hyper-amplified 3D space have been performed in over sixty cities worldwide to critical acclaim. He produces large public artworks and has scored over twenty contemporary dance works. Fox holds a PhD in composition from Monash University and has written a history of experimental music in Melbourne that focuses on 1975-1979. He is a founding director of MESS (Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio).
Rob Thorne (Ngāti Tumutumu) is a new and original voice in the evolving journey of Taonga Puoro. His debut album Whāia te Māramatanga (Rattle Records) is a deeply felt and highly concentrated conversation between the past and the present—a musical passage of identity and connection. Using modern loop technology and traditional Māori flutes and horns made from stone, bone, shell and wood, Thorne creates a transcendent aural experience that touches the soul with timeless beauty. Every performance of Whāia te Māramatanga is a stunning and very personal exploration of the spiritual and healing qualities of an ancient practice.
Sage J Harlow received a PhD from WAAPA exploring improvised ritual magick using extra-normal vocal technique. She performs under the moniker Sage Pbbbt. Her work is inspired by Tuvan and Mongolian throat singing, Inuit throat singing, extreme metal, sound poetry and an ongoing exploration of extra-normal vocal technique. As well as industrial musick, trance, and drone; insight meditation practice, shamanism and chaos magick; feminist, queer and trans praxis; and Discordianism. As well as a vocalist, Sage plays percussion, bass and theremin. She creates sample-based electronic music and writes text scores that explore the ethics and politics between the players and composer.
Sam Peterson is interested in what can be done with one’s identity and the space around it.
'Both my body and mind, touching everyday feelings between the rational, the playful and the political. Of course, this is often to do with my disability and my sexuality. My work has been focused on access, and the lack of it — to places, people’s minds and opportunities. I find plasticine is a great subverter of space and potentially of people’s minds. And the continued flexibility of it is something I am really enjoying — covering or filling up gaps and playing with crevices. But I’m finding that my work is drawing more and more to spoken word as a powerful format.'
Sarah McCauley is a Melbourne-based music producer, editor and writer.
Australian musician Sean Baxter died on 15 March 2020. Part of Melbourne's improv scene, he is described by musician Anthony Pateras as possessing “a unique aesthetic vision and intellectual depth, mixing highbrow philosophical concepts with punk sensibilities in how he lived, spoke and played. He was pure energy.”
Drumkit and percussionist, Sean was an Australian improviser who forged an international reputation as a bold explorer of percussive possibilities both as a soloist and through his work with the acclaimed avant-garde trio, Pateras/Baxter/Brown. Focusing on the use of extended techniques applied to the conventional drum kit, he utilised an arsenal of metallic junk and other percussive detritus to expand the sonic palette of the percussion tradition. In addition to Pateras/Baxter/Brown, he was involved in many collaborations and was drummer for groups The Throwaways, Bucketrider, Lazy, SxSxSx and Terminal Hz.
Sean Dockray is an artist, writer, and programmer living in Melbourne whose work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligences and the algorithmic web. He is also the founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and Aaaaarg.
Sebastian Henry-Jones is a curator led by an interest in writing and DIY thinking. He looks to centre the ideas and requirements of those that he works with, and so his practice is informed by striving for a personal ethics with sincerity, generosity, honest communication and learning at its core.
Seb has staged group exhibitions and independent projects in Sydney and interstate, and is a co-founder of Desire Lines and Emerson. He works as a Curatorial Assistant at the Biennale of Sydney, Associate Curator at West Space, and was previously Editor at Runway Journal. He is currently based in Naarm.
Shamica Ruddock is an artist-researcher often found working between sound and moving image
Shareeka Helaluddin is a sound artist, DJ, producer at FBi Radio and community facilitator working in queer mental health. Creating under the pseudonym akka, her practice is concerned with drone, dissonance, memory, ritual, generative somatics and a pursuit of deeper listening. She is currently creating on unceded Gadigal and Wangal lands.
Sherese Francis (she/they) describes themselves as an Alkymist of the I–Magination, finding expression through poetry and interdisciplinary arts (bookmaking, papermaking, collage, assemblage, performance, social arts practice). Her(e) work takes inspiration from her(e) Afro-Caribbean heritage (Barbados and Dominica), and studies in Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, mythology, and etymology.
Shota is an artist working in Australia. He makes sound-based works for varying contexts. He has had the opportunity to collaborate with a multitude of artists from varying disciplines. Shota is currently an honours student who is associated with the Plant ecophysiology and Ecosystem processes lab at the University of Sydney.
Simon Charles is a composer and performer based in Noongar Ballardong Country (Western Australia). His practice reflects an interest in the instability of compositional structures; as friction between musical notation and perception and interactions with place. He has performed at Serralvés Festival (Porto), The Wulf (Los Angeles) Studio Rotor (Berlin), Vigeland Mausoleum (Oslo), Avantwhatever Festival (Melbourne), DATA (Marseille), ANAM Quarttethaus and the Melbourne Recital Centre.
Snack Syndicate, two rats (Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange) living on unceded Wangal land; texts, objects, events, meals, and publics.
Sonya Holowell is a Dharawal woman, vocalist, composer and writer working across new and experimental genres. The contexts for her work, and the forms they take, are diverse and deeply questioning. Her practice comprises interdisciplinary collaboration, improvisation, multi-form writing and conceptual composition. She is also a workshop facilitator; a curator of the Now Now Festival; lecturer in experimental vocal practice; and a co-founder/editor of online arts publication ADSR Zine.
Sounding Together comprise of the following performers: Rhys Butler (alto saxophone); Simon Charles (soprano saxophone, shakuhachi); Eduardo Cossio (electronics, writing); Luke Cuerel (alto saxophone); Jim Denley (flute, writing); Julia Drouhin (voice, electronics, objects, images); Jameson Feakes (mandolin); Be Gosper (voice, objects); Noemie Huttner-Koros (voice, writing); Lenny Jacobs (percussion); Annette Krebs (amplified string instrument); Annika Moses (voice, images); Josten Myburgh (clarinet, alto saxophone, editing); Dan O’Connor (mastering); Stuart Orchard (guitar, objects, editing); Daisy Sanders (voice, movement).
Spence Messih is an artist living and working on Gadigal land. Their practice speaks broadly to sites of pressure, power structures, materiality, and language, and more specifically about these things in relation to their own trans experience.
Suvani Suri is an artist/researcher, working with sound, text, intermedia assemblages and actively engaged in thinking through listening. Her practice is informed by the techno-politics of sound, aural/oral histories, and critical imaginations activated by the relational and speculative capacities of voice.
Thembi Soddell is a sound artist best known for their powerful acousmatic performances and installations in darkness. In 2019 they were awarded a PhD from RMIT University for their practice-based research titled, A Dense Mass of Indecipherable Fear: The Experiential (Non)Narration of Trauma and Madness through Acousmatic Sound. This research developed a novel approach to understanding lived experiences of anxiety, depression and trauma using a medium (abstract sound) with the unique ability to reflect the intangible nature of the inner world.
Thomas Ragnar is an artist based in Singapore. His work is often underpinned by collaborations, affinities and research with experiential methodologies.
Tiarney Miekus is a writer, editor and musician based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her writing has appeared in The Age, The Saturday Paper, Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow, Overland, Memo Review, un Magazine, Art Guide Australia, Swampland Magazine and RealTime.
Timmah Ball is a writer and urban researcher of Ballardong Noongar descent. She has written for The Griffith Review, Right Now, Meanjin, Overland, Westerly, Art Guide Australia, Assemble Papers, The Big Issue, The Lifted Brow, the Victorian Writer magazine and won the Westerly Patricia Hackett Prize for writing.
Tina Stefanou born of Sophia and Yorgios Stefanou is a first/second generation Greek-Australian. Emerging from an East Melbourne hospital on 21 November 1986. She is thirty-six years old. Now based on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people in Wattle Glen, Victoria. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches, and labours: an embodied practice that she calls, 'voice in the expanded field'.
Tobi Maier is the director of Lisbon’s Municipal Galleries, and recently presented Mattin’s Expanding Concert (2019–2023) a four year long concert distributed in time and space through different media: 5 public interventions in 5 different galleries in Lisbon, and 5 texts published within the city.
Tom Melick is the co-editor of Slug and part of the Rosa Press Collective and Stolon Press.
Tom Smith is an artist, musician, writer and researcher. Narrative 001: The Things We Like was created by Tom Smith, with music by Utility/Austin Benjamin.
His work is concerned with the tyranny and poetics of computational systems, the politics of creative economies, emerging digital subjectivities, planetary futures and music as a mode of critical inquiry. He has worked across speculative fiction, video, curatorial projects, live performance, websites, critical writing and electronic music. Thomas produces music as T.Morimoto, is one half of production duo Utility, and runs independent label Sumactrac with Jarred Beeler (DJ Plead) and Jon Watts.
Thomas’ works have been exhibited and/or performed at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), Unsound Festival (Poland), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Fondation Fiminco (Paris), Cashmere Radio (Berlin), Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), Nasjonalmuseet (Oslo), Floating Projects (Hong Kong), Goldsmiths College (London), Firstdraft Gallery (Sydney), Queensland University Art Museum (Brisbane), Alaska Projects (Sydney) and Blindside Gallery (Melbourne). Thomas’ writing has been published in Realtime Magazine, Runway Journal, Un Magazine and Plates Journal.
Tricky Walsh is a non-binary artist working in New Norfolk, Tasmania, who works both collaboratively and in a solo capacity. Their projects focus on both spatial and communication concerns in an increasingly speculative manner and while they use a diversity of media (architecture, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, sound, film, comics, radio) it is foremost the concept at hand that determines which form of material experimentation occurs within these broader themes.
Trisha Low is a writer living in the East Bay. She is the author of The Compleat Purge (Kenning Editions, 2013) and Socialist Realism (Emily Books/Coffee House Press, 2019).
Uzma Falak is a DAAD doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Heidelberg where her work focuses on the intersection of sound, time and violence. Her poetry, essays, and reportage have appeared in publications like Guernica, The Baffler, Adi Magazine, Al Jazeera English, Warscapes, The Caravan and several edited volumes and anthologies. She won an honourable mention in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s Ethnographic Poetry Award (2017). Her film, Till Then The Roads Carry Her, exploring Kashmir women’s repertories of resistance, has been screened at the Art Gallery of Guelph (Guelph), University of Copenhagen, University of Warsaw, Karlstorkino (Heidelberg), Tate Modern, and others.
V Barratt is a trans-media artist, researcher, writer, and performer living on Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide.
Victoria Pham is an Australian installation artist, composer, archaeologist and evolutionary biologist. She is a PhD Candidate in Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, holding the Cambridge Trust’s International Scholarship. As a composer she has studied with Carl Vine, Richard Gill, Liza Lim and Thierry Escaich. She is represented by the Australian Music Centre as an Associate Artist.
Winnie Dunn is a Tongan-Australian writer and arts worker from Mt Druitt. She is the general manager of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Western Sydney University. Winnie’s work has been published in the HuffPost Australia, The Saturday Paper, Griffith Review, Meanjin Quarterly, SBS Voices and Cordite. She is the editor of several anthologies including Sweatshop Women, The Big Black Thing and Bent Not Broken. Winnie is currently completing her debut novel as the recipient of a 2019 CAL Ignite Grant.
Xen Nhà is a documentary maker and artist with a background in creating intimate dialogues and storytelling across sound, film, and texts. Their work explores the confluence between personal and collective narratives and the cultural politics and responsibility of listening. They are currently living in Melbourne on unceded Wurundjeri Country.
Yan Jun, a musician based in Beijing uses a wide range of materials such as field recording, body, noise and concept. Yan Jun: “I wish I was a piece of field recording.”
Zoe Scoglio’s (often collaborative) practice explores the space of art as a site of study and sociality to engage the radical imagination towards alternative ways of being, knowing and relating. Current research takes critical and collective somatic approaches towards response-ability in these times of ecological collapse, within settler colonial conditions. Past projects have taken place within varied contexts, on top of mountains and under full moons, as large collective choreographies and intimate encounters.
In framing this discussion between Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, and Sean Dockray, I’d like to draw attention to what could be described as an evolution in the methodology and project of ‘shaping the future’. Holly and Mat’s album Platform, from 2015, made a call to imagine a better future. At this time ‘better’ was negatively bracketed against 90s cyberpunk dystopian imagery, reactionary club music and stale future visions which dominated contemporary art and experimental music. Nuanced, creative and kind, Holly and Mat’s Platform instead offered an aesthetic of a non-nostalgic futurism. Their message described togetherness rather than fragmentation.
Platform was made in conversation with the complex geopolitics of the time. Collaborators Metahaven defined this moment as one marked by the ‘black transparency’ of mass surveillance and ‘sousveillance’, and as the operation of a ‘reality stranger than fiction’. In 2015, the desire and conscious decision to try and ‘shape’ the future, via aesthetic and imaginative means, was influenced by the successes of chaotic online movements. Underpinned by philosophies of ‘causality’ (see hyperstition and accelerationism) — of one word having an affect on another word, of one sound having an affect on another sound, like a snowball gathering size — music seemed pedestaled, in this world, to say something important through its unique and interpretative language of play, of symbolism translated from screen to speaker, of conceptual feeling distilled like a form of alchemy from the hand into the song. Via the same method of kitsch meme-magic, and via the same method sold in The Secret’s sigilism of a child’s red bike drawing sticky-taped above a bed — of politics functioning like a law of attraction — the practical agency of music was understood here to work as a form of ‘magic’.
Of course it is magic to listen to a song you love alone in your bedroom, or to dance amongst others in a club, and the political potential of both of these listening conditions remains just as powerful today. Still, in charting the evolution of Holly and Mat’s method and message, from a distant past when the internet was ‘too complicated for governments and corporations to understand’, to today’s world where Anonymous hackers fail to make so much as dent in corporate run police states, the practical necessity of having a hand to play in the creation of new technology is absolutely essential. Holly and Mat here sidestep futurity and aesthetic causality by focusing on two forms of technological intervention. The first technology is old-school and doesn’t require any machines. The technology is called collectivity, and you can use it, as Holly and Mat do on their new album Proto, by simply singing together with other people in one space, by sharing the making of music joyously on stage, by attributing the work of others ethically, and by speaking openly and honestly about the processes of your creation. The second technological intervention feeds from this collectivity by having a machine-learning algorithm learn from interdependent data. In the following interview you will read about the whys and hows of this approach. Having evolved from ‘net-concrete’, the processes of machine-learning are used here to outclass the ‘magic’ of causality and the escapism once found in searching for an ‘exit’ or an ‘outsideness’. Technology in Proto, to my mind, becomes instead a worming inward to the future. This is music of an inwardly focused, closed and walled world, where economic, symbolic and systemic change is up for grabs.
Mat once played me an early version of Spawn and it reminded me of a needle being traced around an unearthed clay pot, a voice and its vibration trapped in a solid form like early recording practices of wet wax and hand-held cone. In today’s moment of algorithmic and network exploration, the analogy to early tape practice is apt, but I would add another image to describe this conceptual moment of an early and prototypical graphism. Experiments in the musical use of machine-learning are similar to the adaptation of figurative pictures which eventually became the first forms of writing. The invention of writing foretold a legacy of empire, of memorialising money and gain. Today, at a similar moment marked by the development of new language, the use of machine-learning is an attempt to reclaim technology from empire, as charted in the following interview. Maintaining an air of artistic rarity and mystique, as Mat describes, is probably a good economic decision in this industry, but you won’t find opaqueness when talking to Holly and Mat. Holly and Mat are honest and open. All is up for discussion here. I hope you enjoy reading the following conversation as much as I did.
*Minor edits have been made for the sake of clarity, I’ve also done my best to provide a lattice of references and links along the way.
— Emile Frankel, June 2020
So glad you’re here. The overview for the event says that we’ll be talking about artificial intelligence and machine-learning technologies, focusing particularly on Spawn. I thought we’d just go straight there, if you could talk about Spawn, the development of Spawn and what Spawn is?
HHSpawn is what we call our AI baby. That’s the headline grabbing part, like, ‘Oooh, AI baby!’ But what it really is, is a metaphor for some experiments that Mat, Jules LaPlace and I were doing with machine-learning and music. Three years ago we were given a grant by the German government to celebrate the death-a-versary of Beethoven.
SDWe’re really glad he’s dead!
HH2020 is the 250th death-a-versary of Beethoven. The concept of the project was ‘what would the Beethovens of today be doing?’ I don’t have the hubris to say that I am the Beethoven of today, but they were giving out small grants for artists to pursue research projects that don’t really fit into ‘normal’ practice, or, who might not have had the economic incentive to go down that path. It was really nice to be given the resources to hire artists, to buy some hardware, and to hire Jules. Jules is a developer that we met while we were living in California. He’s a badass, crack developer who is also a musician. Being able to share a musical language and to have him understand what some of our goals were earlier on was really great. So we just started messing around with creating our own dataset, cobbling together different software that we found on GitHub. For the first six months, it basically sounded like shit. It was really awful. We almost gave up, but then we had a couple of breakthroughs. We started using SampleRNN, which is a recurrent neural-network technique. That’s when things started to sound interesting for the first time. This can be heard in the track on Proto called ‘Birth’, and that’s when we started to hear the logic of the network.
MDI think you’re right, in saying that SampleRNN was a breakthrough moment, but actually, the bulk of the work we did on the record didn’t involve SampleRNN at all.
HHThat’s true.
MDI only make that distinction specifically because the correlation between this technology, and what we classically understand as sampling technology, is something we’ve tried to step away from. Has anyone seen those 24 hour death metal YouTube things? Right? That’s SampleRNN. The basic idea is that you can train a network on a piece of sound and then it will try to anticipate what comes next on the basis of what came before. It creates a pretty interesting illusion of development, or generation. We were desperately trying to get away from the idea of just ‘recreating’ something, as impressive as that technique is. The bulk of the interesting stuff, that I would consider to be Spawn, is more to do with training neural-networks on a corpus of sounds that were created by us, our collaborators, and audience members from different performances that we were doing.
HHWhen we started the project, we didn’t really have a clear idea of what neural-networks could do. We really wanted to just get our hands dirty with it, so that we could build a conceptual framework and understand our own stance on the technology. When we started researching it, we found that a lot of people were using it … Like, you guys have seen Infinite Bach, where you train a neural-network on an existing composer’s corpus, turn it into MIDI data, and then you can create Bach forever? Or music that sounds like Bach, forever. There are a lot of examples of machine-learning projects like that. A lot of examples where algorithms are hoovering up anonymous audio or anonymous MIDI files online, and training on these sources. So from a very early point we decided that we wanted to focus on audio material because we didn’t want to abstract audio into MIDI files. There were many aesthetic and political reasons for that. The other thing that we wanted to do was to create our own datasets. We didn’t want to use anonymous datasets, or use really large datasets, such as from universities. Those were two early constraints that we put on the project.
SDHow long did it take for you to get to that realisation of wanting to use custom data sets?
MDFrom pretty early on. Most of the neural-net software libraries that were being released were focusing explicitly on MIDI. To the extent that when you speak to the vast majority of developers or most companies, and when they think about machine-learning and music, they think about ingesting MIDI and spitting out MIDI. That goes back to the early 80s.
HHWhich is why music, from a very specific period of time, is often used as an example for machine-learning. It’s flattered by the score, such as Beethoven, for example. This is when the score was at its apex, when the score was often even valued above the live performance. But over the last hundred years or so there are many kinds of musical parameters that aren’t very well captured in MIDI data. And those are a lot of the things that I care about, like context, timbre, etc … It became really clear that even though you’re not physically sampling, this process was similar to sampling. You’re essentially sampling ‘the vibe’ of something so heavily that it felt like a legal issue.
SDWhat I think that you’re pointing out is an issue concerning the reanimation of the dead. Taking this archive, and continually refreshing it — or not even refreshing, but propping it up and keeping it alive. Going back to Spawn, you’re very quick to insist that Spawn functions as a metaphor. I’m interested in that, this need to assert that Spawn is a metaphor and not the thing itself.
HHWell, I’m a little bit allergic to some of the kitsch around AI narratives. I was worried that by using a ‘baby’ metaphor, people would think we were actually having this baby. With all the femme bots and stuff that we see in this emergent culture, I didn’t want to perpetuate this further. That’s why I was trying to be clear, and I was trying to explain that Spawn is not just one, fixed thing. It’s multiple things, multiple processes.
MDWe’re being polite in using ‘machine-learning’ and not bringing up the AI question. In most of the proxy wars happening around AI, the conversation exists in the realm of metaphor. Most people have no idea about what is technically going on. That’s always the tricky thing in our case. It’s different with us individually, but collectively, we have similar experiences. From one angle, we’re putting out a popular record that we understand is going to be pushed out, and hopefully teenagers will care enough to come to festivals. That’s the thing that pays the bills. And then there’s this other side, your academic facing one, where Holly’s writing her PhD thesis. So you literally can’t bullshit, right? There are credibility issues, where many people — who I will not name — feel completely free to talk utter shit about AI and basically lie to people. I mean, fraudulent claims around the uses of AI music. Like, we can’t do that. You, [Holly] specifically can’t do that, because your thesis advisor at Stanford said so.
HHBut, also, I don’t want to do that!
SDCould you talk a little bit about why you’ve given Spawn a gender?
HHYeah, this has come up a lot. I think the reason is that the first training I did with Spawn was with my voice. The first utterances I heard from Spawn were my voice, and I identify as she. I heard myself reflected back to myself. Some people have taken issue with this because of the history of female digital assistants being treated poorly and then that translating into the real world, into the human world, of treating female assistants poorly. I think that’s a real issue. But also, this project is about trying to create a counter narrative, another vision for this. So I didn’t feel like I had to be shackled by that version.
SDTreating female assistants poorly makes me think about the way we treat the living. Just as a segue into the way we train our machine-learning models, I’d like to get you to comment on the particular ways that Spawn was trained, in contrast to something in the vein of Susan Bennett. If you read how she was treated during the training of Siri, Susan Bennett was working four hours a day. That doesn’t sound like very long, but it’s a really long time to be reciting nonsense sentences, cleanly and clearly, five days a week, for a solid month, in order to produce the voice of SIRI. Then she was more or less tossed aside. She only recovered years later, for various reasons. But the way that Spawn is trained obviously operates according to a different kind of logic. I want to ask you about both the public and the private performances of training Spawn. It seems as if there were different modalities.
HHYes. That’s another reason why we use the baby metaphor. We see her as being raised by a community of vocalists that we’re working with. Our ensemble. The idea was not to use random data, but to actually hire people, to name them and pay them for their time. But this gets more complicated as we do public performances. I think we always try to be respectful of people’s privacy.
MDThe first time we tried this, two years ago, was with a piece called Deep Belief. It was a theatre piece, and the whole idea was that we had icons who were all ensemble members that performed characters. The characters were symbolic, or representative of a different vision of where technology might go.There’s also a big distinction between recording the individual voice of somebody that you can identify and recording the abstract voices of thousands of people. But in terms of anyone who we sat down with and said, ‘we want your voice to participate in this record’, they are credited and were paid for their time.
HHThat was also the stoner thought: that as soon as something becomes captured in a medium, a photo, a video, it becomes machine legible. It can become part of a training corpus that can create something from its own logic. And that seems really obvious, but once you come to that conclusion it’s like ‘oh my god’. Everything could be modelled! Even from this talk, if somebody was recording it, our voices could be modelled. Then you start to get paranoid. You go down the wormhole, of what does it mean to have a voice? What is it? What is vocal sovereignty like? Like, traveling in Australia, I hear this amazing Australian accent that you all share. Voice is a shared communal thing, but you perform it as an individual. So it opened up a Pandora’s box of what it meant to have this audio fingerprint.
SDYou bring up a fear which is quickly being realised: that your voice can be synthesised from you. It takes as little as five seconds of audio to do. That is definitely terrifying. It brings up this question of consent, which doesn’t normally enter into our thinking. On the topic of ‘giving up’ data, something that is not often thought about is the terms of the reanimation of data. The reanimation of the dead.
HHWe don’t have proper legislation around it. I don’t know what it’s like here but, for example, the prison system in the United States is awful. The Intercept released an article a couple years ago, about how prisoners were caught in an ‘opt in only’ contract. If you wanted to use the phones in the private prison your voice would be modelled and the company would then have this model. Then in any future investigations, they could be scraping, trying to listen for your voice. Not only the voice of the incarcerated person but whoever they were talking to, who was not incarcerated, on the other end of the line. Things like that are happening in real-time, and sometimes the laws don’t catch up in time.
MDYou can clearly imagine future employers acquiring that data set, to screen convicted felons for future employment opportunities. It is distressing. And, further, on the consent issue the late Whitney Houston is going on tour today and presumably never personally gave consent to tour posthumously. There’s a whole lecture we give on this too, on Lil Pump and XXXTentacion. They were two SoundCloud trap stars who both sadly died during the past couple of years. Even though they didn’t like each other when they were alive, their management and family have given consent on their behalf to collaborate together posthumously. Isn’t James Dean being reanimated for a movie? … So bleeding edge.
HHThis is why I keep using the word necrophilia, artistic necrophilia. This is a term that Miles Davis used, when he criticised sampling when hip hop culture started. He thought that each generation should create a new sound that reflects their current conditions and, arguably, hip hop did exactly that. So I think that was a little short sighted but it’s also quite prophetic, when you look at these Tupac hologram shows, or the Whitney tour, and so on. From a lot of things, like voice modelling, or ‘vibe stealing’, there are things that you can achieve through machine-learning which make us question what we should do with our shared archive. Maybe this is something that’ll be completely passé in the future, like the way that we look at playing an old film. Maybe that would’ve been hideous to someone two hundred years ago, but it’s just something that we have to deal with legislatively. Together.
MDAnd there’s no going backwards, right? That’s part of the reason why we’ve both been given pause. Questioning some of the ubiquitous logics of sampling, and just general entitlement to media, that has been the countercultural, commonplace mode since the 1990s. That’s the cultural mode that I grew up with, this libertarian, individualist ideal, that everything is basically mine to play with. So long as I’m not punching down, whatever that means, or whoever arbitrates that.
SDIt’s like, negative land.
HHAnd it’s not to erase an entire history of music that we love. Of course, Pierre Schaeffer liberated sound from its origins, and all these things are really interesting, but they are also time specific. I mean, when you liberate a sound from its context, you also liberate it from its author. From cultural and religious content, from whatever context surrounds it. When we look at the history of sampling, there are many egregious examples, such as the Enigma song ‘Return to Innocence’, where they take Taiwanese aboriginal music and make a euro-trance song out of it. Luckily, they were taken to court, and then the musicians were reimbursed, in some ways. But that’s the kind of logic on display here. If we don’t deal with it now — and we’ve done a really shitty job of dealing with sampling — we only have two options. There’s freedom of information for everything, or hellacious digital rights management from the major label side. You don’t want to choose either of those. Nobody wants to be a sample cop. But what is the third mode?
SDTo ask that question more specifically to you, Mat, perhaps you could speak a little bit about Saga and the lessons that you’ve drawn from it. It hasn’t been updated in the last four years, so it feels like something that you’ve left behind?
MDFor those who don’t know, years ago I worked on a project called Saga. It’s basically a decentralised publishing framework. The idea is that when an artist, publisher, or anyone who wants to publish something publishes their work online, Saga gives you the tools to alter your content in every discrete location where it exists online. For example, you post the track to SoundCloud, the track disseminates across the web, people embed it. In this example, what happens today if you took exception to, say, Mercedes Benz embedding your track on their blog for free? You would either have the choice to take your track down everywhere or leave it up. The idea with Saga was that you could have little switches. You could say, ‘No, Mercedes Benz, I don’t want you to have it but this kid here can have it.’ Then, because that railroad has been built, you could additionally publish code. For example, ‘No, my song, video or text is free everywhere until 200 people view it in one location’ and then afterwards people have to pay money to view it. Part of the idea at the time was looking at how advertising runs the web. If you make something, put a bunch of time into it, then publish it online, there isn’t really a mechanism that allows for you to be compensated for that. And then what if you find yourself on an Intel blog and, all of a sudden, they’re driving all this traffic to their blog and ostensibly using what you did. There are even more egregious examples. Imagine finding your artwork on a white nationalist’s blog. What would you do in those circumstances? What kind of recourse do you have, when it’s all just out there? Saga was an early attempt to think through some of these issues. Why is it that we’ve accepted this, in the digital realm? This common sense, realism idea that once it’s out there, it’s just out there. Who does that benefit?
Saga was, and is, now a dead project. But the original idea was about allowing people to have control of their work in a digital space. Just as easily as if it were a piece of physical work that I would choose to put in a room. There’s a long story as to why we aren’t working on Saga anymore. But it does tie into this idea of not wanting to create impenetrable DRM, as you said, or to go back to a time of wanting to hoard information, but trying to think of what a middle-ground might be. I’m happy to have an argument with someone about this, but freedom of information narratives — while they might sound very seductive — ultimately helped Google. Freedom of information led to the creation of large entities who can, under the subcultural, countercultural cool of sampling, or the dynamic of moving fast and breaking things, feel at liberty to take whatever they want. That’s the origin story of Google. For better or worse. Google indexed the web without asking any party and created a new map upon which they could sell services that nobody else could offer. That connection is still in music and sound communities. It’s difficult, I’ve enjoyed a lot of sampling music, I’m really happy that this music existed and so forth. But that kind of countercultural tool is ultimately the same kind of logic that has been used to create Silicon Valley and its impenetrable companies. But when you point to sample music and say, ‘well, are you doing anything different?’, many artists that were quick to criticise Silicon Valley might back down. It’s a much longer conversation.
SDWhat we’ve been discussing connects to the right to die, the right to be forgotten on the web. Just because something exists it doesn’t mean that it has to exist in perpetuity. Obviously, perpetuity is in the interests of Google, but how does this connect to the right to silence, or to the right to not have to say anything? In AI, the generative potential of these neural-network models is that you’re able to reanimate the dead, that you’re able to create a model from past performances, from an archive as a dataset. But what happens when you generate something ‘new’ from data which originated in a community? Who, really, does that information belong to? It didn’t originate just in your genius brain. That originated in a community, so it should go back to a community…
Music is one very audible, or sensible way that we experience this. But on an everyday level, after we pass away, our data is going to continue to have some agency, through some neural-network or another. Applying this to generative models, we see people who work with AI saying stuff like, ‘Oh, I generated this new thing, and it sounds weird. Isn’t that really cool?’ … Perhaps you could comment on that, on the ways that working with AI restructures the way you work with other people, with your collaborators. The way it generates new limitations and affordances?
HHWe see AI as a new way to collaborate and as a contemporary coordination mechanism. That’s why we created a thread between early vocal music, vocal folk music and using the voice with neural-networks. We were thinking about early vocal folk as a technology, as human coordination technology. People used nasal singing, in the upper parts of their faces, to make sound travel really far across mountains, to scare predators, and these kinds of things — as a coordination technology. I’m always trying to think about how we can make the computer a performance instrument and Spawn isn’t really there yet. We’re trying to get there but, for me, it’s always about how I can use this work in order to coordinate with other people so that we can play together. Specifically with this ensemble, I wanted it to augment our communication with each other. For us, it’s really important that we’re able to have these euphoric singing moments with our ensemble. We don’t want working with a neural-network to become an awkward or heavy process, it shouldn’t be a block. Instead it should be helping, facilitating.
MDWhen we started working on Proto, before there was an ensemble, we thought to ourselves, if this record is going to mean anything then the technology has to be an ambient thing that witnesses real human activity. What you were saying about performance, Holly, is that it ultimately kills or slays real human activity. Most discussions around machine-learning and music are dry demonstrations that ultimately demonstrate more of what we’re lacking than what we’ve gained. For example, Amazon did some heinous generated audio thing. This is, presumably, state of the art technology, because Amazon has a lot of money to throw at this stuff. But when you witness it, it’s like … I don’t know anybody who would think, ‘wow, the future of music is going to be incredible!’ It shows the opposite. It demonstrates … a bedroom noodling thing, whatever.
HHThere’s nothing wrong with bedroom noodling!
MDNo, no, sorry. I’m not saying …
HHWhat he’s saying is the generic identikit, like, ‘Rock kit, with beat’.
MDYeah, exactly. That crap.
HHWe all love a bedroom noodle.
MD… I’m fascinated by the economics of all art. Once you understand it, everything becomes much clearer. Small economic distinctions and decisions, like how much something costs, who gets the visas, who runs it, everything. There’s already a habit of cost cutting and efficiencies around the festival circuits in the art market. Where demo art does do really well, particularly digital demo art where you can send a file and it can appear in every biennale instantaneously. That exists in music, too, but is also somehow more impoverishing. So part of the grand gesture that might be appreciated by this room, more than most conversations in the world is, how do we make the most irrational economic decisions on this topic? Because, actually, flying a bunch of people around the world to sing is really economically irrational for someone in our position. But it’s possibly the best thing you could do, when talking about AI or automation, particularly in an electronic music context … The point is to try to think about how technology can actually augment relationships and not exploit people in the process. This is what we have spent the most time deliberating about.
HHI think that’s an early kernel of why we put together a vocal ensemble.
SDOne way that I’ve thought about similar things is in observing the way that a GPT2, which, if you don’t know, is a language model by Open AI (Elon Musk and Microsoft also funded it). You type in a sentence and the AI generates the next few sentences. It’s remarkably good. You read GPT2 and you think, ‘Oh yeah, that’s human-like, maybe I could have written that.’ And then you see people sharing these sentences, copying and pasting them, and everyone using it. You keep hitting ‘generate’, ‘generate’, ‘generate’. And there’s a disposability to every single artefact that’s generated. I was thinking about this disposability of labour when we become data that is reanimated through models like these. When the labour of writing doesn’t exist anymore and there’s no human labor and no real cost (except an environmental cost), when humans are cut out entirely … there’s a total devaluation of life. It seems like what your approach has done, at least in my reading of it, is to confront that disposability of AI through a reclamation of the training process.
MDYeah. Every time these machines get more efficient, it becomes easier to make meaningless art. It takes human beings to give things meaning, right? The thing that sounds a bit different, or maybe has a story associated with it, or a community associated with it, will be more valuable and scarce and rare as a property. It will stand out in a sea of nothingness. Fetishising how easy it is to generate fairly competent, meaningless art isn’t really that cool. Unless you are a developer at a research organisation, whose task is to try and render the most convincing piece of meaningless art as possible. And there’s nothing wrong with that, that’s an impressive accomplishment, but that’s not the art that I care about. Why would I care about that?
HHThe ability to ‘steal a vibe’ is something I care a lot about. Don’t steal my vibe! I think the speed at which you can ‘steal someone’s vibe’ is going to become lightning fast. It’s something that Peli Grietzer writes about. If you guys don’t know who he is, I would check out his work. He wrote an article for Glass Bead a couple of years ago called A Theory of Vibe, and it explains how a neural-network can efficiently analyse and understand the vibe of something and reproduce it without really understanding where that vibe might have come from. As someone who cares about ‘the bedroom noodler’, who comes up with something that is unique to them and then has their ‘vibe’ taken away immediately … that’s what I get concerned about, in a scary dystopian way.
SDWe’ve been talking mostly about AI in the production process. Could I use this opportunity to nudge the conversation to discussing the consumption and distribution process, and the role of AI in ‘vibe matching’, auto-generation, and stealing within platforms like Spotify? Within the act of listening, how is listening guided by these silent actors?
MDI really don’t like Spotify. I mean, in trying to say something smart, the parallel is the entitlement found in a libertarian, individualistic sense. The fact that you can take something, decontextualise it, and all of a sudden it’s yours makes me really heavily critical of DJing as a practice, even though the history is venerable and wonderful. I have many friends who are DJs, they are wonderful. But actually, I had an argument with someone –– who I won’t name because I respect him –– on Twitter. But what he was saying was, ‘When I take a piece of music and I play it in my DJ set, it then becomes mine.’ And I was like, ‘Well, what do you do to it?’ Because to me, it just sounds like Usher, or whatever. What have you done to this track so that all of a sudden it’s yours? This is just entitlement, right? It’s like, a Lockean, settler colonialism idea. Saying, ‘I’m here, and I’m making value out of this piece of media right. It’s mine!’ … That’s a really long, deep liberal argument. A very profound argument …
Again, in relation to this 90s countercultural moment you should all go and watch the interview with Chuck D and Lars Ulrich, about Napster, on MTV. It’s fascinating. It’s amazing. And Lars Ulrich was actually so spot on, even though he comes across like a cock. You really get this feeling of this 90s moment. Where there was tech, where everything was possible. It was going to be the hip hop moment. It was going to be the remix moment. And how that opened this back door, to companies saying ‘look, just trust us! We’re gonna re-order everything!’ And then of course Spotify comes along with this act of decontextualising something, removing any semblance of information about where it came from, who supported it, the location. By design, Spotify alienates that piece of media from anything, any amount of labor or love that went into it. By design. Spotify are not stupid, they know exactly what they’re doing. That platform is designed by hundreds of people. And when you listen to a track you can’t even find the label. You can’t find the city. As little attempt as possible is made to root or situate this media. And this is ultimately an act of displacement and stealing. What hubris and entitlement, not only of the people working on those systems, who make these playlists (and we’ll have a race to the death of some random anonymous people who probably get paid a tonne of money to run these big playlists), but also of the individual who’s listening. There’s a degree of entitlement where the most common argument to justify Spotify is that it’s better than piracy, but that’s not really an argument because there is a degree of individual responsibility there.
Again, I don’t want to be Lars Ulrich, and tell everyone that you need to spend all this money that you can’t earn, which is because of the digital economy, on albums that don’t exist anymore, or whatever. But there is a root, an original sin there, of entitlement. And we can nerd about this for a long time. I often talk a lot about Tim Berners-Lee or Al Gore, and the original sin of HTML being an entitled act, and lament the fact that I can reference anything online, on my special page, and that there doesn’t need to be back attribution to where that came from. HTML allowed for that possibility. It is that 80s, 90s libertarian Californian ideology that led to that. Anyway, my long way of saying that Spotify sucks.
SDI know that giving credit to a web of people who are involved in the generation of an idea is something you talked a lot about with Platform. Because the metaphor, the language of Platform is already about the fact of the platform as something that gives visibility and enables others. The role of the platform is to enable the behaviour of other people, for other people to work on, and build atop what you have created. Then you move to Proto, where AI is a discursive terrain. You mentioned paying the people who give their voices to Spawn, but in light of what Mat was just talking about, on algorithmic populism that drives taste on these platforms, how do you go about crediting a voice in a crowd? Again, what does giving credit mean?
HHIt’s difficult, because I feel like the whole industry is set up for the genius individual, meditating on the mountain. Everybody wants me to be a blissed out synth queen who’s coming up with all the ideas myself. If I push back against that image, then it’s like I’m pulling back the curtain and losing some mystique. It’s happened so often: I’ll have an interview where I’ll talk at length about the people I work with and then you read the interview, and it’s just like ‘me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me’! They just cut it out! You have to actively ask people, ‘can you please print this’, ‘can you please mention people by name’, ‘can you post people’s websites’, things like that. In this attention economy, we’re incentivised to just push ourselves as individuals as much as possible. It’s a constant balancing act and a bit of a struggle. I’m also not somebody who feels super comfortable being the centre of attention all of the time.
SDIn your interview Re-Engineering Hegemony you talk about what post-capitalist music might mean, or what it might look like. You reference what I think is an ongoing fantasy of automation, which is that if we manage to displace enough work to technology, then we’re freed up to make the most interesting decisions, or have different relationships with each other?
HHI think that’s what we tried to do metaphorically on the stage. Now that we have all these intelligent light systems and projectors what can we do onstage instead of just standing there? It means that we can be joyful together, hug each other, love each other, enjoy each other, and ultimately be more human together, because we have time that’s been freed up to do that. That’s the ideal.
SDYou often talk about new fantasies, that as a musician you’re able to enact these new fantasies. I feel like what you’re describing in these shows, where there are a lot of different people involved — different modes of listening and attention, different modes of spectatorship, modes of production — is the performance of new fantasies.
HHA lot of that came from touring a lot and being part of an electronic music community. There was a lot of dystopian fantasy around at the time. There’s such a history of dystopianism in electronic music. Of course, I come from that lineage too. A lot of that stuff is really amazing. But I was looking for something that was presenting an alternative, like asking for a seat at the table, as the music economy was changing so much. I wanted the musicians around me to also be making demands for what they wanted, instead of just saying ‘this sucks’ and just being unhappy with the situation, revelling in the situation. It’s actually much harder to come up with a vision of what you want. I felt this dystopian approach was giving up power to those who were already in power, by just ceding control. My practice, as someone who is obsessed with vocal processing, means that from the very beginning music is a fantasy moment. I’m transcending the physical limitations of my voice. I’m an okay singer, but I’m not, like, an awesome singer. But from the beginning, I was like: how can I do something that’s better than myself, bigger than myself, or more fantastical than my physical body?
MDI’ll speak from maybe a different economic angle. The post-capitalist question is really interesting to me. How can you make an idyllic scenario that is actually visible? Because that’s a difficult question, more than making an idyllic utopian experiment in a vacuum, how do you make something that is resolute and resilient enough to be seen by masses of people? For those who don’t know, Alex Williams, who conducted the Re-Engineering Hegemony interview with us, wrote Inventing the Future with Nick Srnicek. He was a leftist accelerationist type; it’s funny because Alex and Nick were the poster book of the leftist accelerationists. This brings me back to that cultural moment, the idea and search for a post-capitalist music. At the time there was a proxy war that was happening discursively between Dis Magazine and PC Music. These were what I would consider, right accelerationist approaches to making music, with attitudes like, ‘Run it into the wall! Nike! McDonald’s!’ Out of such hyper-pop, accelerated advertising music, how can you make a critique? And again, I like a lot of those people. But you have to have an opinion, right? Then there’s the other side of it where you have to think, okay, how do you not dismiss the potential of new networks and dismiss all media as being corrupt and cynical, which a lot of it is? How do you embrace some of this stuff? To try and carve something out that might be positive, even if that could ultimately be a futile exercise. That was where Platform came from, from an attempt to open up this conversation. Like, hey, platform co-ops. And there’s all this cool stuff that you could do that’s maybe less libidinal!
HHBut that approach is much less functional in a music economy.
MDAnd that’s a problem. It’s really difficult here, because as you said before, Holly, you try and credit all these people that you work with. And then when you read the article, it’s just about ‘me’. But my counter argument to this is, if it wasn’t just about you, would we even be sitting here? Would we have a career? That’s the challenge, because culture is like a sieve. You think you can just make this beautiful thing and push it through but then some things die, they get abstracted. Ultimately, the economics of the industry will dictate what products, or what people end up stepping through.
HHParticularly when you actually care about your collaborators.
MDAnd particularly because we’re academic-adjacent, so we’re really just corrupted the entire time, right? We’re hypocrites. Everything we do, we’re hypocrites. The most difficult thing to do is to find some way of having some of those embers survive, as they pass through.
HHYou have to Trojan-horse it.
SDAnd I can also see the appeal of universal basic income, which is something that’s come up a few times around your work. What you really want is not to develop the perfect system, so that everyone is remunerated precisely for the contribution that they put in. That kind of overzealous accounting, it’s horrible, you just want everyone to not have to suffer in order to live. The basic communist creed: everyone gets what they need, according to their needs. As simple as that.
MDThat’s also the challenge when it comes to these machine-learning systems on that bigger level. Is it really socialism, or is it barbarism in this scenario? Because these things work with a lot of information. You don’t have the local farmer’s market version of big AI if you want to solve cancer, you have to have the data of the entire country working together.
HHI’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to have a protagonist lead vocals on a stage. What it means to be a front woman, because now I have an ensemble of people that I’m working with. Is it possible to play that role, but to also pass that baton over, and have someone else on the frontline for a little bit? That’s something that we play with. It’s not fully baked, but it’s something that we’re experimenting with.
SDI don’t know if it’s the same thing but when I was younger I tried to set up projects so that power didn’t exist. But then I came to the realisation that power is always there, whether you want it to be or not.
HHIt’s funny that you bring that up. In some of the early experiments that we did, we wanted to try out ‘non-hierarchical’ jam sessions. And they were the worst jam sessions we ever had. Turns out, you do need somebody to intervene. But it was actually important that we went through that process. Of being like, ‘no, I have to be the leader here’, but that doesn’t mean I have to be a shitty leader or an asshole. You can actually be a kind leader, while having power dynamics that aren’t so hierarchical or so stable.
MDSociety pushes you. Power exists ambiently, whichever way you deal with it.
HHThis is the thing that really turned me off classical, neoclassical, contemporary ensemble music work. I noticed that if I didn’t exert myself as a super dominant composer, the ‘you’re doing it wrong’ composer, it wouldn’t work. There’s this S&M dynamic between performers. Sometimes, they want to be told ‘no, you’re fucking it up! Work harder!’ But that’s not how I like to work with people. I had a couple of experiences where I had to hire a conductor to do that. But I couldn’t do that myself! I just couldn’t embody that. It’s really about finding the right kind of communication balance within ensembles. The writing of the music is much less difficult.
SDAny questions from the audience?
Crowd member 1In talking about file stealing and Spotify sucking, would you say that this will occur in a not-so-distant future? If the end game for platforms such as Spotify is to just have automated, generated music by stealing ‘vibes’, how far away do you think that possibility is?
MDIt’s quite far away. The ‘vibe’ question is a very real question. Right now the technology exists to take the vibe of a composition and render it into MIDI. So, rendered into the impoverished abstraction of MIDI, discerning the ‘vibe’ of a Kendrick Lamar beat will happen, but we’re quite far away from that. Piano playlists do really well on Spotify. And yeah, go home, make a neural-network to spew out piano playlists on Spotify, and you might make some money. But I think what you’re talking about is those automated systems taking over, which we’re far away from. And, actually, that’s a nice thing. In the short term, in our lifetime or career span, there are more opportunities to do cool work in the augmentation space, rather than in the replacement space …
HHI disagree a little bit. I think that when it comes to genre-specific music, we’re not that far away from being able to replace it. But, if you think that composition is more than just the statistical analysis of notes, as in, it’s meaning making — and a lot of that meaning making is the context around the music: the concept around it, who’s making it, and where it’s being made — that’s the squishy, messy stuff, that a neural-network is really bad at analysing. But in terms of being able to create a generic house beat, I think we’re really close to that. And I think a lot of people are satisfied with that as their music. But a lot of people are also not satisfied with that. I think Hans Zimmer is going to be fucked … But I also think that’s okay!
MDI think his assistants are totally going to be fucked. Yeah, you’re right. In genre specific experience rendered into MIDI, and the actual compositional process? Yeah, we’re screwed. But in the timbre-like sonic elements? It’s close. But actually making it mean something? Nah. Then again, there are a hundred thousand people going to the most boring techno festival in the world. But who am I to say what people give meaning to?
Crowd member 2My question is that when you listen to Spawn, do you still feel like you’ve created that? Do you feel distance or do you still feel that connection, of the music being yours?
HHIt’s like when you write something for a human ensemble and they interpret it for you. It’s never 100% entirely yours because somebody interpreted it through their physical body. But you’re still the composer, because you wrote it. That’s how I feel about using a voice model. Spawn is performing a line we’ve given her. ‘Birth’ would be the most improvisatory track, where there’s a line between composition and improvisation. That’s when things start to get really blurry.
MDI’ve seen some representations of the record, and you can’t control what people write about it, but people talk about it as ‘generative composition’. And that would be misleading, because a lot of people would also think that oh, yeah, the AI just came up with this music. No! That Jlin track was the most laborious thing on the record. It wasn’t a process where you say, ‘Spawn, just make some music!’ This actually took so freaking long. The actual print component at the end took a couple of minutes. But to actually get the system working, and to tweak it to the point …
HHSpawn will perform something you’ve given her and sometimes she’ll do something unexpected. But, in a way, that’s what all human performers do.
SDOne place I didn’t go is the experience that I’ve had in working with AI, too, in thinking about the childlike aspect to it. On the one hand, it’s the most advanced technology, it’s the pinnacle of all these advancements, of research and computation altogether. And at the same time, if you actually experience working with AI, you feel that it’s a little child, learning how to talk. They do it all wrong but, still, you can tell that they’re really smart, intelligent.
HHThat’s why we wanted to work specifically with audio instead of MIDI material. With MIDI, you create a ‘clean score’ that you push through a Native Instrument suite or something. The outcome can appear really perfect. With audio, you can really hear the imperfections; where it’s still dumb, you know, she’s not there yet. These imperfections are really powerful and really silly at the same time.
SDI think you are recognising that we’re at this moment where culturally, historically, we haven’t yet realised that all these dystopian or utopian narratives are in unfixed emergence. We’re still in a process, and there are still openings to intervene.
MDThat was the idea of calling it Proto –– the precedent before something happens. We joke a lot about artificial intelligence because a lot of the time there is a primitive thing that’s occurring. And there’s a pristine representation of that, you know, it comes up with a score, and then you give it to the chamber ensemble of Singapore to interpret the score, and it sounds incredible! And you’re like, I’m pretty sure it didn’t come out like that.
HHBut that also ignores all of the incredible human intelligence that goes into performing that thing.
MDExactly, the artifice there also obfuscates the human labor that’s going into training the freaking thing. The differences in output are so minuscule that, unless you get really deep into it, you’re not really going to appreciate it. But the practitioner community is quite open and shares a lot of stuff. This reminds me of the tinkerer generation, or nerding-out over early tape experiments. Like, this could be really crazy in 20 years time. Really crazy.
HHBut if we tried to make it sound as if it was ‘really crazy in 20 years time’ and super polished … I don’t know. I think it’s more interesting to show it for what it is today. And on that note, we should wrap it up. I’m hungry!
Holly Herndon experiments at the outer reaches of dance music and pop. Born in Tennessee, Herndon spent her formative years in Berlin’s techno scene and repatriated to San Francisco, where she completed her PhD at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Her albums include Platform (2015) and Proto (2019).
Mat Dryhurst is an artist who releases music and artworks solo and in conjunction with Holly Herndon and the record label PAN. Dryhurst developed the decentralised publishing framework Saga, which enables creators to claim ownership of each space in which their work appears online, and a number of audio plays that derive their narrative from the personal information of listeners. He lectures on issues of music, technology, and ideology at NYU, and advises the blockchain-based platform co-operative Resonate.is.
Sean Dockray is an artist, writer, and programmer living in Melbourne whose work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligences and the algorithmic web. He is also the founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and Aaaaarg.
Author of Hearing the Cloud (Zero Books), Emile Frankel is a writer and composer researching the changing conditions of online listening. In his spare time he runs the science fiction and critical fantasy publisher Formling.
This conversation was transcribed by Hannah Wu from the Liquid Architecture event, ‘Inhuman Intelligence’, in January 2020, presented with Melbourne Recital Centre.
Notes