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Disclaimer is a journal for new thinking and writing on listening and sound. Published by Liquid Architecture.

Editorial Associate: Tiarney Meikus

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Index

Liquid Architecture

Content Types

Artist Profiles (15)

Audio (4)

Audio Papers (46)

Editorial (3)

Essays (68)

Conversations (27)

Scores (11)

Series (19)

Text Poems (10)

Contributors (208)

  • 33EMYBW

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Ander Rennick is a graphic artist based in Melbourne interested in the fetishisation of editorial, pedagogical, pornographic and mimetic commodities.

  • Andrew Brooks

    • 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

    • Andrew Fedorovitch is compos mentis.
 Andrew Fedorovitch embodies professionalism in every aspect of his life, including music.

  • André Dao

    • 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.

  • Ange Goh

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Annika Kristensen is Senior Curator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.

  • Arben Dzika

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Ben Raynor is an artist, living in Melbourne.

  • Bianca Winataputri

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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.

  • Casey Rice

    • Sound Mastering: Casey Rice is an audio doula living and practicing on Djaara Country/Castlemaine, Victoria.

  • Catherine Ryan

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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 LG Hill

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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 Cooper

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Denise Helene Sumi is art historian, author and professionally involved in culture.

  • Diego Ramirez

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Elena Biserna is a scholar and independent curator based in Marseille (France), working at the intersection of social, political and public spheres.

  • Eloise Sweetman

    • 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.

  • Emile Frankel

    • 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.

  • Emma Nixon

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

  • Ernie Altohff

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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 Butler

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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.

  • Gooooose

    • 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

    • Hannan Jones is an artist working at the intersections of sound, installation, performance and moving image.

  • Han Reardon-Smith

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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.

  • Immy Chuah and The Convoy

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Jamal Nabulsi (he/him) is a Palestinian diaspora activist, writer, scholar, thinker, and rap musician.

  • James Hazel

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Jim Denley is one of Australia's foremost improvisers. Over a career spanning four decades his work has emphasised the use of recording technologies, collaboration, and a concern with site-specificity.

  • Joee Mejias

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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.

  • Johnny Chang

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Kengné Téguia is a Black Deaf HIV+ cyborg artist, who works from sound deafinitely. #TheBLACKRevolutionwillbeDEAFinitelyLoud

  • Kenneth Constance Loe

    • Kenneth Constance Loe (he/they) is an artist, writer, and performer from Singapore, and currently based in Vienna, Austria.

  • kirby

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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.

  • Laurie May

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Lin Chi-Wei is a legend of Taiwanese sonic art, whose practice incorporates folklore culture, noise, ritual, and audience participation.

  • Lisa Lerkenfeldt

    • 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 Quintanilla

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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.

  • Makiko Yamamoto

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  • Mandy Nicholson

    • 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

    • 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

    • Maria Moles is an Australian drummer, composer and producer based in Narrm/Melbourne.

  • Martina Becherucci

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Mitch L Ryan is a writer whose work explores histories of countercultures, music, media, and politics.

  • Moritz Nahold

    • Moritz Nahold is a Vienna-based sound artist and composer.

  • MP Hopkins

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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.

  • Nathan Gray

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Philip Brophy writes on music, among other things.

  • Poppy de Souza

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Sarah McCauley is a Melbourne-based music producer, editor and writer.

  • Sean Baxter

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Shamica Ruddock is an artist-researcher often found working between sound and moving image

  • Shareeka Helaluddin

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Snack Syndicate, two rats (Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange) living on unceded Wangal land; texts, objects, events, meals, and publics.

  • Sonya Holowell

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Thomas Ragnar is an artist based in Singapore. His work is often underpinned by collaborations, affinities and research with experiential methodologies.

  • Tiarney Miekus

    • Tiarney Miekus is a writer, editor and musician based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her writing has appeared in The Age, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow (Online), Overland, Memo Review, un Magazine, Art Guide Australia, Swampland and RealTime. She is currently editor and podcast producer at Art Guide Australia.

  • Timmah Ball

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • Tom Melick is the co-editor of Slug and part of the Rosa Press Collective and Stolon Press.

  • Tom Smith

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • V Barratt is a trans-media artist, researcher, writer, and performer living on Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide.

  • Victoria Pham

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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.

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Index

Liquid Architecture

Records of Displacement
and the Echo as a Beckoning Artefact:
Lucreccia Quintanilla
speaks with Fjorn Butler

<p>DJing as part of ARTBAR curated by Caroline Garcia, 2017, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.<BR>Photo: Del Lumanta.</p>

DJing as part of ARTBAR curated by Caroline Garcia, 2017, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
Photo: Del Lumanta.

If you were to apply an anglophone conceptual frame to give an account of Lucreccia Quintanilla’s practice you could refer to it as characteristically ‘inter/multi-disciplinary’. Lucreccia dwells in multiple fields: as DJ (DJ General Feelings), writer and researcher (currently a PhD candidate at Monash University), installation artist, a mother, a co-conspirator in interrogations of race, culture and patriarchal dominance. However, her processes cannot easily be placed within disciplinary fields that are treated as parallel lines; lines that only intersect as a consequence of willing a connection across institutional boundaries and partitioned thought. Each discipline is like a fragment of a system within a body: always embedded, isolatable in theory but not in practice, fused together as a holistic vision. Lucreccia’s approach is not tied to honouring cultural production as a form of individuated exploration of ‘universal’ concepts, nor does it imbue the object of production with a representational or material quality that can be experienced as abstracted from its cultural imaginary. It is a practice that invites a form of autonomy in deliberating place and historicity, by respecting the specificity of artefact.

Lucreccia describes her research of late as an investigation into how sound can be thought of as a mode of knowledge transference.1 This begins from the idea that sound is a conduit of information, containing disparate traces of complex histories, and communal bonds that are not bound by the transience of time. From this perspective the timelessness and boundlessness of sound becomes apparent in the sense that, in order to decipher when a sound’s life as an echo commences and dissipates, it is necessary to consider the contingencies of space — you might pull the plug on the sound source, but the vibration rings on, bounding off surfaces and feeding back, confronting its fractured permutations of self, neither forgetting nor replicating its source. The echo is an active, alive connection to its original utterance filling up the room and creating space. This conceptualisation of sound is also a reminder that a ‘conduit’ like a ‘sound system speaker’ simultaneously sends and receives signals, despite which action we might privilege as its central function. The dual function of a sound system speaker can be analogised or thought of as a metaphor for how information proliferates, mainly in terms of how significance is created, resonates, but also feeds back, altering while referencing origin. An output signal of a speaker may at times be the most audible/visible/dominant sensorial aspect of a sound system, however it is not representative of the totality of the sound system in terms of its function, in terms of its potential, and in terms of both the signal’s and the sound system’s socio-cultural significance. As a sound system simultaneously absorbs while it outputs, rogue frequencies are not just a contingency but a property. A sound system’s signal can inevitably project beyond the intended parameters of its meaning, resonating and accumulating multiple significances, intersecting worlds and thus placing pressure on the points at which structures are joined at points of difference. Further, the escalation of a signal into feedback and sustained resonance does not nullify its source, but beckons it. Thus, an echo is not a sign of static individuation or a property that can be grasped and possessed. Receiving, listening, sensing, emitting are complex and shared experiences — a collaboration. That is why Lucreccia ended our conversation so eloquently by stating ‘understanding is a task you do together’.

Lucreccia’s research thus aims to challenge the fundamentals of anglophone ontologies and epistemologies that attempt to confine the mutable nature of space, time, and place to a calculable experience and fixed truth. Her research has become aligned with the work of Louis Chude-Sokei and Julian Henriques, both of whom write from their experience of sound system culture as a springboard for analysing how sound culture produces a non-linear and multi-directional signal. Chude-Sokei and Henriques’ work, like Lucreccia’s, is also always dedicated to unveiling how sound system culture emerged, emerges, and exists as a deeply specific cultural and political form.

I spoke to Lucreccia about her research into, and experience of sound system culture, and what it means for such a culture to take place in the settler colonial occupation referred to as Australia.

  1. Lucreccia Quintanilla, ‘Other Planes of Here: Sound, Multiplicity and the Social’, (2015), iv. ↩

Fjorn Butler

Research tends to commence from a weird love affair with a voice that finds you and a path that opens up — what has been your story?

 Lucreccia Quintanilla

I found out about Louis Chude-Sokei in the South African culture magazine called Chimurenga Chronic1 — I just went ‘who the fuck is this person!?’ Unlike a lot of theorists, he thinks about tradition and begins from another epistemological tradition, one that is much more relevant to the way things function rather than the way things can be thought of or could be. In my own research I had already decided to skip Gilles Deleuze, so I went straight to Henri Bergson because — Deleuze is Bergson. I looked at these books from the 1920s, but I had to refrain from delving in to Bergson’s work and using him, or justify anything that I am doing through him because you end up having to refer to the fact that Bergson wrote an amazing book about humour. In this collection of essays entitled Laughter he introduces humour and muses as to why ‘sometimes you laugh at things in a way that’s so unpredictable, and your body just reacts to things’, for example in the way that your body wants to laugh at ‘the sight of a Negro dressed in European fashion’.2 I understand for example that so much writing around sound and sensation/immersion goes back to Bergson. And I really appreciate how the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica’s writing refers to Bergson, but my reading took me elsewhere and I was happy I didn’t have to reconcile these contradictions so that I could keep engaging with the ideas I hold.

  1. Louis Chude-Sokei, ‘Dr Satan’s Echo Chamber’, in Chimurenga Chronic, vol. 12/13 (Cape Town: Pan African Market 2002). ↩

  2. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudsley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (1911; reprint, New York: MacMillan 1928), 20. ↩

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There are people that will take that comment with a grain of salt and contextualise it historically as being of its time. However, such a strategy assumes a severance between the racialisation of folk at the start of the 20th century and today’s context. This severance is purely an imaginary one. Such a statement can also be viewed as an indication of a foundational and structural element in Bergson’s thinking and not just as an indicator of the role of racism as an infra-political structure of his place and life, which makes his voice audible for us now. For one, it contours his work in terms of where he would apply an exception (one that is biopolitical).

 LQ

Many feel they can just categorise such a statement as a theoretical flaw and put it to one side. But I thought, well, if I’m going to talk about Bergson then I am going to have to talk about Deleuze and if I talk about Deleuze I’ll have to talk about Lyotard, and thus pay my dues to the entire western canon before I get to my point.

Chude-Sokei and Julian Henriquez and others bypass all those thinkers and traditions. When speaking to a philosophy inherent in sound system culture, how it is absorbed through the body and is thus embodied knowledge, they refer to Platonic traditions, including feminist critiques. This is where they commence from to ask the question of how an embodied sound culture functions to support and foster culture in diasporic communities.

Henriquez is heading a research cluster at Goldsmiths that’s all about sound systems –– it’s about the philosophy for him, but the amazing thing is how it is open to disciplinary crossovers. Chude-Sokei’s work is also like this, where there’s a crossover between thinking about how culture functions, watching and documenting and responding to it, and then directing the outcomes of those enquiries to question how philosophy functions.
<p>Lucreccia Quintanilla, 'Other Planes of Here Soundsystem', 2015. Photo: Keelan O’Hehir.</p>

Lucreccia Quintanilla, ‘Other Planes of Here Soundsystem’, 2015. Photo: Keelan O’Hehir.

DJing, Sound System Culture
and the Diasporic Relation

FB

Recently, I’ve noticed a lot of people trying to re-insert a bracket between what a DJ is and what a producer or sound artist is. These arguments seem to be trying to diminish the creative role of a DJ or define what a DJ does in a manner that distinguishes what they do from a creative practice. In your description of your sound system project you prioritise the DJ and surrounding social worlds as aspects, or fragments, of a whole creative practice.

 LQ

There is an antagonism. But I realise that there is no point in engaging with that kind of manufactured dichotomy. I became really obsessed with watching Youtube videos of Grandmaster Flash recently and it was sheer creativity that propelled him to invent techniques and sounds. We forget this creativity as well as the larger creative conversations. It’s interesting to me because when I started DJing it was assumed that I would play Latin Music, though I was really into Dancehall. However, I noticed the similarities between the styles and I was thinking about their connections. And then Reggaeton hit and I was like, what the fuck has just happened, did I predict this? Or was it already in development and I have heard its embryonic stages? At this time, I was hanging out with lots of Reggae people in the early 2000s who were really into Roots. We would order music packages from Ernie B together, the Jamaican distributor from Los Angeles, I’d always be purchasing Dancehall and they were like ‘what are you doing, that’s not Roots, there’s no meaning in that!’ And I’m like … there is meaning, there’s meaning for me in it. And I don’t know what you get out of Roots! Like, it’s called ‘Roots’ and I found some of mine in there! And I, of course, get the appeal but there was no need for such disdain! Ha ha! It was a particular time and place, and what I liked was very dirty. But then I think of Lady Saw and how revolutionary she is, and of course Ivy Queen, saying the things no one else was saying –– there is something to making your own place, sound and voice, rather than trying to create a space for yourself in a world that’s already has its own rules, structure, and place for you.

 FB

The meaning in your story is perhaps about finding a new way to connect with your own roots. And that was instigated through Dancehall?

 LQ

I’m all about the story and I’m all about the connections — why is it through Jamaican music that I became closer to Reggaeton, and what is African music doing in there? I wanted to find out what all these layers in the music were!

I just wanted to play Reggaeton but apart from Ms Butt (artist, Eleanor Butt), who got me my first gig playing at a night she was running where she encouraged young women DJs to play, back then no one was interested. I found how music was being received was a mess. On the other hand, I had arguments with people who thought what I played was ‘too culturally specific’ and not ‘universally accessible’. People still tend to believe that music should be universal and understood by everyone. Having these experiences forced me to spend a lot of time to think about what my role in playing music was. In order to do this, I first needed to find my own space because I didn’t want to be DJing to people who would perceive the music I played as exotica. Because I would then also get questions like ‘why are you playing this music, how long have you been here for?’ I’d been in Melbourne for thirteen years, which is not a long time, but it made me realise the scenario was political. It’s funny that things have changed quite a bit now. Yet also it’s interesting that unless you have a very well-defined sense of self you will get these conflicting things flying your way!

 FB

They are literally asking why you haven’t adapted your whole repertoire to suit the tastes of the dominant local community, and not assimilated.

 LQ

Yes, assimilate! So, I got people from that community who I knew liked reggae but I also decided to keep playing whatever the fuck I wanted. Funnily, the more ‘fuck you’ I became about just pushing the thing I wanted, the more people responded. I’ve now found people who are really into Dembow and Reggaeton. So, I decided to just keep DJing my music, but then I had a house fire and all my records burned! Prior to the fire a friend got in touch about putting on a night called ‘Collectors Set’ at the Recorded Music Salon, on Collins Street, Narrm (Melbourne). I had stopped buying vinyl, so began collecting music again via MP3s and I took on the role of a selector. I didn’t worry about the trickery like mixing, I figured that if I could maintain my rhythm, then I could trust myself to mix visually. I didn’t have any programs, I didn’t have money, and I had an eight-month-old — I just wanted to make money and play the music I loved and get my friends to get paid to play what they loved.

 FB

In your work you talk about the difference between mythology and fetish, between representation and immersion — you put these terms into a relation that doesn’t affirm one term at the expense of the other. The relation you put any two terms in is generally presented in terms of trying to understand their in-between. For example, the difference between creation as a shared and thus social praxis, and the artist as a producer that shoots signals out into the world for the purpose of attaining an immediate and calculable form of currency.

 LQ

The way I have been thinking through this is as an irresolute thing. I know community needs to be founded in an actual functioning space that first activates something within that community in order to go somewhere, manifest. There are cultural genealogies contained in sound; they are immersive, sensorial pedagogies that transfer knowledge through sensation — impacting the body not through representation, signs, images or fantasies, but through energy, rhythm, and resonance. So, sound systems relate to the diaspora, they developed out of that. They articulate the diaspora, and they continue to do so. Also, its irresolute because it never stops growing, learning, changing, exchanging. This is how culture functions.
FB

How do you think a diasporic culture can activate and respond to space, while also experiencing a disconnect from familiar space and familiar imaginaries/ways of thinking?

 LQ

I have been thinking about how that may apply to the Latin American experience as a diasporic culture. It’s a culture that is not purely about geographic space but also about ancestral space. When King Tubby speaks to the African ancestor and African voice in dub, I recognised that the way it is presented in his music, is not dissimilar to what goes on in Cumbia, but there’s also a Middle Eastern influence, as well as Indigenous sounds and rhythmic structures. Take for example the similarity in the beat of Cumbia and African beats, and even the way instruments weave in and out in Cumbia.

In El Salvador we love Cumbia, and where I’m from there’s been a history of African slavery. At some point that was dismantled and that whole history was covered up, and the whole dialogue became really racist. Yet, the national instrument is the Marimba, which is an African instrument, it originated in West Africa in Ghana, Mali and other West African regions. So, I was wondering, why is it that El Salvador has forgotten about our African heritage? The Marimba, and an instrument which is called the Caramba but is very much like the Berimbau, have come to be known as Indigenous instruments. The Berimbau is a bowed stick with a string on it and half a gourd on the end of it. The most important part of it is the amplification, which echoes out of the gourd. Take note that this is a sound system!

 FB

So, these instruments are evidence of the diaspora, evidence of the connection between cultures whose connection came out of the slave trade. However, this connection is not articulated as a historical narrative of national or collective belonging?

 LQ

It’s not, but the connection and the history is inscribed in the music, and it’s exactly the same thing that King Tubby was doing through the use of production techniques — this music is inherently speaking about a particular context and heritage, and for me it is a better avenue to think about decolonisation than just applying a theory to a context like it’s static or romantic. These connections between the African slave trade, Indigenous peoples and the Latin diaspora, are still functioning. When someone says, ‘the last Mayan has spoken’ — well, there’s no such thing as an end to Mayan culture. There are so many Black folk in Honduras and Guatemala, and even though there’s no strong narrative to articulate this presence in El Salvador, the music speaks to the existence and intersections of people and continues to speak to people even when they don’t want to speak to it outright, although there is a movement growing.

 FB

In public discourse here, in so-called Australia, there is very little out there that specifically details and upholds the important role of cultural engagement and communal creative practice in maintaining the trace of complex, ignored, or even silenced histories and worlds of knowledge.

 LQ

Yes, you are right. I guess perhaps it’s the flattening effect social media may have. At the same time there are some great things going on too. But there are musicians who work and rework what they are doing according to how culture appears to intuitively operate — with culturally meaningful content. For all the talk about sampling, I think all contemporary writing on sampling is detracting from the fact that this action is something that has always gone on! One song can be carried on from one generation to the next, not through nostalgia, but with actual additions, changes. A new lyric changed to get rid of the misogyny here; a BPM that is only possible as a result of new technologies in instrumentation and production, there; even a change of genre, so that Cumbia in a 1920s song becomes a Reggaeton song of 2019.

 FB

Sampling is not that different from the action of sharing. It is very much analogous to talking, or forms of intercultural exchange and dialogue.

 LQ

And it’s like — people are trying to articulate how sampling could be something new. It’s not new at all. Yet there are so many books about sampling that came out in the 90s talking about it like it’s this recently formed incredible language.

I lived in Brisbane when I first migrated to Australia and there’s a Dutch lullaby that is a part of an Indigenous ceremony there. This is one of the ways that we know the Dutch came here — it’s a record of cultural contact and sharing, without having to look at a map. The fact that this lullaby exists betrays the dominant Western ‘rationale’ for understanding cultural groupings and how humans function in the world. This is why the language of identity politics can really let this process down, culture functions outside of identity politics and racial denominations, like those set up by the Spanish which created the Mulatos and the Mestizos for example, it is beyond that.

Sound Culture’s Visual Analogies

FJ

You’ve said before that the thing about sound is that it’s not particularly representational, at least when it comes to how the body experiences it. This notion is evident in your installation-based work, where the presentation of aspects of sound culture — in their somewhat material forms — escape being purely bound by visual modes of representation and interpretation. I see it in your exploration of the amplification of cultural knowledge through cultural objects, like in the piece entitled ‘If you close your eyes you will see what is really there’ that was part of the 2017 group exhibition Everything Spring. Of course, there are visual aspects that shape how one engages with this piece; you have put an iPhone in a ceramic conch shell, painted black and lying on a bed of weeds.

 LQ

I made those conches in Banff while I was reading The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, and I was in the ceramics department wanting to make something that could carry sound or was involved with amplification. My favourite objects at the museum in El Salvador were the pre-Columbian conches made out of clay. They were often made to be played as instruments; some have holes so they can be played as flutes. So, I endeavoured to make a ceramic conch. During this time I had told my child Ruben that when I was a child I believed that stars were tiny windows into light. Like a mantle, the night was pierced to let the light on the other side come through.

In the Parable of the Sower Octavia E. Butler writes: ‘When I was your age my mother told me that the stars — the few stars we could see — were windows into heaven. Windows for God to look through to keep an eye on us’.1 These words were said by Corazon, the stepmother of the central character, who like me is from Latin America. In the book her son’s name is Ruben Quintanilla! Ruben is my son’s first name!

  1. Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, (New York: Warner Books, 1993), 5. ↩
<p>Lucreccia Quintanilla, 'I walk towards you', 2013. Image courtesy the artist.</p>

Lucreccia Quintanilla, ‘I walk towards you’, 2013. Image courtesy the artist.

FJ

Something from your past connecting with another history, that emerges from a memory while you are engaged with an aspect of it thematically in another mode. In a way, it is an analogy for the echo, or delay — the repetition of a motif running over a loop, feeding back and moving through cerebral space over time — eventually becoming audible because it is reverberating off something in your immediate state.

 LQ

That’s it. What is also amazing is, usually conches are played from the tip and you blow, but I tried to make it so you could put the phone into the space where the shell opens. So, when you put a sound source in the shell, it not only amplifies the sound from the phone — it echoes! It echoes more like reverb but in a gallery space it also echoes because it’s in an empty space, so the sound goes into the pipe, it goes around and bounces out the tip.

 FJ

With your practice there’s a strong element of having to trust yourself, your process, and work through what comes to you regardless of whether its relevance is immediately clear. That sort of process means that you allow something to connect and grow, which is just as much about the people in it as it is the product that may be birthed.

 LQ

When you’re in that zone you just let all the things that you are thinking about take over the creative process. Well, that’s never really happened to me before, and this time it happened. This is especially difficult in the academic world where things have to be empirical. But there is an actual rational, intellectual basis in the creative act of aggregating lived knowledge, which is a crucial ingredient in making culture.

 FJ

The entire paradigm of ‘objectivity’ and ‘universality’ is extremely flawed. But the most destructive element of objectivity is the way that western or anglophone imaginaries frame cultural production that stems from figures of alterity, in terms of objecthood. Here I refer mainly to the idea that you can transform a form of cultural production into an object of consumption, thus in the process severing cultural production from its socio-cultural and historical specificity.

 LQ

There’s just no arguing for the case of universality and objecthood. I think this is why I have gone into academia — this is where you talk about universality and so this is where you also get to challenge it. And this is why I have talked about Sun Ra instead of going to the continental philosophers.

 FJ

Sun Ra is one artist who was not only trying to break conceptual barriers to imagine a possible future, but he was culture forming — by bringing all these musicians into his world, playing with them but also teaching and directing them to embrace improvisation and free form expression.

 LQ

And that is radical! Sun Ra was rustling paper and making all this wild stuff that is radical and academic institutions still, decades later, don’t want to touch it because it shakes up the canon so much. I gave a lecture about this stuff in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and I put up a picture of Sun Ra in full regalia and everyone just burst out laughing. I was so offended on behalf on Sun Ra, and for a second I had an insight into what it would have been like for him to get up on stage. Despite him knowing he was on to something, even though he got called crazy, even though the only technical language he had, the most ‘universal’ and palatable language, was Christianity through the bible. Sun Ra didn’t go to university, he read the bible instead!

However, in his time Sun Ra, was talking about the difference between being a slave and assimilating. Instead of accepting the assimilationist notion of freedom that was tied to the civil rights movement at the time, he searched for this ‘out there’ space — an entirely new place where imagining a way of living that could be otherwise, and the space and energy to really put it into fruition, would be possible. Emancipation, really imagining freedom, is only truly possible when you can create beyond reference to those frameworks that govern your oppression.

Assimilation and Decolonisation
as a Migrant

FJ

The pressure to assimilate is something that I assume has been an aspect of your reality and I want to bring this notion back to thinking about how sound system culture is strongly associated with diasporic culture. You have previously stated that there’s a strong sound system culture in so-called Australia, which you interrogate in your research. You have also expressed the necessity to employ a decolonising methodology in your research. Given that a decolonising methodology demands we challenge fixed or definitional forms of heteronomy, say typical of the master/slave relation, it requires we confront the structures, systems and rationales that ultimately maintain colonial forms of governing power, in their socio-historical specificity.

How do you engage socially, culturally, politically, and historically to the specific colonial context/reality you are situated in, that is, how do you respond to the ‘Australian’ settler-colonial occupation context? And has this informed how decolonising methodologies feature in your praxis?

 LQ

In terms of the academy, it is difficult to pursue academia given that its institutions are predominantly governed and framed to serve what you called anglophone-oriented societies, to serve and uphold white supremacy. The ‘natural’ order of things within that space is that I must speak from the voice of victimhood, which I find boring. But theorising is part of culture, everyday culture, even. Culture has an element of theorising to it in order to understand itself in a self-reflexive manner. It’s when this process is separated from the way that we live, when it’s divided into something, it then becomes intimidating to those who aren’t embedded in that world.

The work ‘If you close your eyes you will see what is really there’, 2017, was a creative engagement with how I walk to my studio via Merri Creek. It is based on a realisation that I can’t just walk down this path and be romantic about it. I cannot be oblivious to the way settler culture aestheticises what it refers to as ‘the natural world’ or ‘nature’. I bumped into a lot of council workers that were cleaning up the introduced species, and I started to realise that all the plants weren’t native. So, I thought I’d engage with the place in this way because there is a lack of the sounds of native birds, there’s so many introduced birds, but when you use a sharp microphone you don’t pick up what your eyes tell your brain to see. This is important because I had to force myself to not see some of the ‘beautiful Australian landscape’: most of the blooms that were hip-high, which had beautiful flowers, and herbs like rocket. I could say I am just foraging, but I need to account for the fact that they are an introduced species encroaching on the habitat and that needs to be accounted for. So, I collected the introduced plant species and then made a sound piece just recording all the layers of the things immediately — you do hear some native birds in the work, but they are hard to pick out amongst all the Miner birds. This, so far, has been my way of engaging with my surroundings and space around me.

 FJ

Your engagement with, and experience of the Merri Creek habitat, while decontextualising it from the horizontal aesthetic of landscape that is typical of the settler-colonial visual canon, also allows the elements involved to be containers of multifaceted narratives.

 LQ

Technically the piece is very basic. Like my DJing, it’s not like I am using amazing equipment. It’s all very simple, which is part of my method and thinking too. To be able to hear something for what it is is a simple gesture. There are no native plants in that piece — the rule was they had to be things that I could pick out, and thus it couldn’t be native. If I picked it up, I had to take the root out so it wouldn’t grow again, because it would eventually seed given that it was spring. As a rule, I could not create more seeds for the growth of an invasive species. It was a small gesture as obviously I had left more behind that I had not picked and I am aware of this but also art is all about gestures in my opinion. During the exhibition the weeds tangled into each other as they dried, forming a type of wreath around the sculpture, and also, because they had been uprooted, they flowered in a panic.
<p>Lucreccia Quintanilla, <br> 'If you close your eyes you will see what is really there', 2017. Photo: André Piguet.</p>

Lucreccia Quintanilla,
‘If you close your eyes you will see what is really there’, 2017. Photo: André Piguet.

FJ

This approach transposes to thinking about people and place as introduced species. I think a question that is being asked now is, as a settler-migrant, can you settle roots in a place that is not yours? This is a pertinent question when you are so preoccupied with questioning your inhabitation of space, resources and forms of capital here. What does, or can, putting down roots mean?

 LQ

I don’t think anyone here has been capable of really putting roots down. That’s why those neo-Nazis are always up in arms and so reactive, because they know they have very shallow roots. They may not know it intellectually but they can certainly feel it, and that’s why they are so defensive.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the sacrifices that first migrant generations make. They come here, have a family, but in order for that family to thrive they work their butts off. So that sort of talks about a temporality that involves more than one generation. Some have had to think in terms of the longevity of the lineage, for whatever that means to them. You have to think of the past, the future, and what you stand for at the present time in relation to both those things. So, if we were to think about that in terms of the migrant, and us right now as a generation of migrants that negotiate what making place is (and in a way that means not having roots, given that we are not invited to make roots), we are the generation through which place is being sorted out, we have to figure out what that means. Because I see mothering as a practice that draws from cultural practice, just like writing or music is, I am focused on my son attending various Indigenous ceremony and festivities, like Wominjeka Festival for example. It is important for Ruben to understand himself in terms of the impermanence of being here, it’s a state of being that requires cultivating. We are here, but it is just as much about how we live here. It’s about questions more than about answers for me. How do we proceed forward beyond self-serving or performative rhetoric or knee jerk outrage? I want to find this out.

There’s no echo in any of us being here until after colonisation, but there is for Indigenous people. I can’t have an echo here, I have an echo that belongs somewhere else but it resonates through here. We all have an echo but we are not part of, or grounded within this land. It is just being overlaid over something.

 FB

How then do you figure the sound system as a space-making conduit for diasporic cultural formation in the settler context?

 LQ

You can always interact with a sound system if you are able to be vulnerable with it and engage with it. In some ways the sound system is a bit like the Mayan pyramid dedicated to the/a bird called the Quetzal — all the little steps to this temple are amongst bigger steps that make up a pyramid shaped building. Some archeoacoustic researchers say the steps going up to the top chamber of this temple are designed so that when you clap underneath it the sound of your clapping ricochets from one step to another and is amplified by the chamber in a way that mimics the sound of the call of the Quetzal bird.

 FB

Another aspect, mainly concerning the technical aspect of speakers, is that they emit sound but they are also simultaneously microphones, they receive sound. I feel that the simultaneous emitting/receiving applies to how you understand the function and purpose of sound system parties.

 LQ

If you are just purely receiving, not worried about what you are emitting — you treat the sound system party and community purely as an object that serves you. In this sort of scenario, the DJ is speaking through the speaker, yet if the audience is just receiving and not also simultaneously emitting then there’s no feedback loop, no dialogue or conversation going on, no energy transference or accumulation — it’s just the pathways of consumerism.

 FB

Currently, there’s a lot of people now framing their questions of the political and politics in terms of interrogating what listening is, and what receiving is. Not only in terms of how you convey an idea, but also asking questions like: how do we listen? How do we perceive what is information or significant? What do we designate as noise or utterance and something that can be discarded or ignored?

 LQ

The things about engaging with ideas and philosophes around sound system culture itself, such as the work of Julian Henriques, is that one begins to perceive engaging with sound systems in a more wholistic manner. What the sound does, how it plays with the body, the sense of community in which it happens — I believe that if you consider these questions as a foundation to work from, and encourage a sense of experimentation when creating, then you don’t have to deal with paying your dues to these strict formulas of form, style and genre that determine what is noise and what is music.

I was talking to a friend about how I was described as a sound artist, and my feelings about it. He said that the reason this term came about is because people who made sound and engaged with it as an artistic practice (and yes you should just be called an artist) is because there was a need to differentiate sound exploration from the classical canon. For so long, sound art has been about creating a space beyond the classical-music-dominated canon, but that distinction is also false — sound art now is the canon.

Generally, in traditions where distinctions are enforced more prescriptively than descriptively — the boundaries in genre and history become viewed as strict principles. For example — that Igor Stravinsky song ‘Rite of Spring’ — when it was first performed, the audience left and were so angry, it was such a controversial piece at the time. However, now whole ballet compositions use it, people do their dishes to it.

 FB

Eventually ideas that are introduced and initially perceived as noise, upon cultural repetition, do become familiar, become social institutions and thus change social perceptions.

 LQ

The first time you hear the unfamiliar you have to work really hard to understand it. More importantly you need people around you to listen with you, understanding is a task you do together.
Contributor/s

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.

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.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

An earlier version of this text was previously published in Minority Report, 2018, edited by Audrey Schmidt.

Notes

    Disclaimer is a journal for new thinking and writing on listening and sound. Published by Liquid Architecture • Disclaimer is a journal for new thinking and writing on listening and sound. Published by Liquid Architecture •

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    Mattin, Elena Biserna, Tobi Maier, Geoff Robinson, Clare Milledge, Tom Smith with Jon Watts, Zoe Scoglio, Tricky Walsh, Debris Facility Pty Ltd, Kengné Téguia, Holly Childs and Angela Goh, Pan Pan Kolektiva, Alexander Powers, Jannah Quill and Anne Zeitz


    Edited by Anabelle Lacroix

    Notes from a
    Stranded Islander
    Winnie Dunn

    If a wave crashes on Liku beach
    and no tourist is around to hear it,
    does it make a sound?

    Singing
    China
    Ivy Alvarez

    How is it that — when the world owes much of our creature
    comforts to China — the country and its people are still so
    denigrated. Discriminated. Demonised. Vilified.

    Songs You Can't Hear
    Timmah Ball

    Before silence
    There were lyrics
    A woman in a building
    Sung histories we imagined
    Fixed to our homes

    One year
    of a link based email newsletter
    Christopher L G Hill

    Contents

    1. back to the…LAN (Luddite.Action.Network?)
    2. back to the…LAMB(Love.Angel.Music.Baby)
    3. back to the… L.O.T.I.O.N. (Leaders Of Tomorrow Ingest Only Noise)
    4. back to…Japan
    5. back to front
    6. B2B P2P
    7. back against the world
    8. back back back back back back back back back back back back backety back back back back back back back back back back I’m baaaaaaaaack back back back back back back I’ll be back back back back back back back
    9. back beak
    10. fluid spine
    11. ⛓️ c⃣h⃣a⃣i⃣n⃣m⃣a⃣i⃣l⃣ 𝖘𝖓𝖆𝖎𝖑🐌(っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ 1̷̧̖̂̀͐̐̍̎͊1̴͙̙͓̣̙̱͇̎̄͗̍͑͘ ♥
    12. Straw Camel’s Shell

    O, this editorial
    — an attempt
    Autumn Royal

    Protocols for Listening
    In (and After) Social Isolation
    Snack Syndicate

    And I am also thinking of tomorrow
    —Suzanne Césaire


    Snack Syndicate, Tom Melick, Kynan Tan,
    Spence Messih, Jason De Santolo, Trisha Low

    Teiji Ito: Music for Film
    Michiko Ogawa

    Passage To Nirvana

    The Spectacle-Rave
    Bridget Chappell

    ‘Nothing is more alien to a strike than its end’

    No Comment (Coda)
    Thomas Ragnar

    On Bridget Chappell and Others

    Sean Baxter
    Let’s do Pure Fucking Armageddon!

    What do you want us to do? Like long song or short song or punk rock or grindcore or breakcore or disco?
    Motherfucker! Brutal! Let’s do Pure Fucking Armageddon!

    Unsettling Scores
    Sovereignty, Resistance, and Futurity

    Megan Cope, Dylan Robinson, Candice Hopkins and Raven Chacon, Rob Thorne, Nick Ashwood, Johnny Chang, Megan Alice Clune, Andrew Fedorovitch, Sonya Holowell, MP Hopkins, Shota Matsumura, and Alexandra Spence


    Edited by Joel Stern and Debris Facility

    Inhuman Intelligence:
    Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst
    in conversation with Sean Dockray

    Introduction by Emile Frankel, author of Hearing the Cloud
    Score: Lisa Lerkenfeldt. ‘Collagen’, 2020
    Disclaimer is a journal for new thinking and writing on listening and sound. Published by Liquid Architecture • Disclaimer is a journal for new thinking and writing on listening and sound. Published by Liquid Architecture •

    The Scroll Begins Unfolding:
    Lin Chi-Wei in conversation with
    Alessandro Bosetti

    ‘No one wants the scroll to end’

    GIRLISONFIRE:
    Dedicating to the sick and blooming

    written about by Holly Childs

    ta
    Amanda Stuart

    For Chris Mann

    Echoes

    Poetry by Neil Morris
    Track
    Herbal Gemini, 33EMYBW

    2 Know Mercy / Ribcage

    Poetry by Kt Spit
    Score: Eric Avery. ‘Ancestory Play Ancestry’, 2019

    Regardless
    of Recognition

    Brian Hioe
    on the Aurality of the Sunflower Movement
    Composition
    Double Path Illumination, James Rushford

    New
    Sonic Territory

    Harmony Holiday on Fugitive Listening

    5𝐰𝟒𝐫𝐦𝟏𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐡@𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝟑𝐫𝐬
    𝖎𝖓 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖜𝖔𝖗𝖑𝖉 𝖜𝖎𝖉𝖊 𝖜𝖊𝖇

    Natasha Tontey in conversation with Bianca Winataputri

    ‘Baby Smiles After
    Hearing Azan For First Time’

    Chi Tran and Arben Dzika

    If Something is Asleep
    You Can Always Wake it Up

    Mandy Nicholson
    in conversation with Danni Zuvela

    Podcasts