Eavesdropping

Eaves­drop­ping is a unique col­lab­o­ra­tion between Liquid Archi­tec­ture, Mel­bourne Law School and the Ian Potter Museum of Art, com­pris­ing an exhi­bi­tion, a public pro­gram, series of work­ing groups and tour­ing event which explores the pol­i­tics of lis­ten­ing through work by lead­ing artists, researchers, writ­ers and activists from Aus­tralia and around the world.

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EAVES­DROP­PING used to be a crime. Accord­ing to William Black­stone, in his Com­men­taries on the Laws of Eng­land (1769):​‘eaves­drop­pers, or such as listen under walls or win­dows, or the eaves of a house, to hear­ken after dis­course, and there­upon to frame slan­der­ous and mis­chie­vous tales, are a common nui­sance and pre­sentable at the court-leet.’ Two hun­dred and fifty years later, eaves­drop­ping isn’t just legal, it’s ubiq­ui­tous. What was once a minor public order offence has become one of the most impor­tant politico-legal prob­lems of our time, as the Snow­den rev­e­la­tions made abun­dantly clear. Eaves­drop­ping: the ever-​increas­ing access to, cap­ture and con­trol of our sonic worlds by state and cor­po­rate inter­ests.

But eaves­drop­ping isn’t just about big data, sur­veil­lance and secu­rity. We all over­hear. Lis­ten­ing itself is exces­sive. We cannot help but hear too much, more than we mean to. Eaves­drop­ping, in this sense, is the con­di­tion – or the risk – of social­ity per se, so that the ques­tion is not whether to eaves­drop, but the ethics and pol­i­tics of doing so. This project pur­sues an expanded def­i­n­i­tion of eaves­drop­ping there­fore, one that includes con­tem­po­rary mech­a­nisms for lis­ten­ing-​in but also activist prac­tices of lis­ten­ing back, that is con­cerned with mali­cious lis­ten­ings but also the respon­si­bil­i­ties of the ear­wit­ness.

This project directs our atten­tion towards spe­cific tech­nolo­gies (audio-tape, radio-​tele­scope, net­worked intel­li­gence) and pol­i­tics (sur­veil­lance, set­tler colo­nial­ism, deten­tion). Some con­tri­bu­tions address the per­sonal and inti­mate, others are more dis­tant or foren­sic. Their scale ranges from the micro­scopic to the cosmic, from the split-second to the inter­minable. What all the artists and thinkers involved have in common, how­ever, is a con­cern not just for sound or lis­ten­ing, but what it might mean for some­one or some­thing to be lis­tened-​to.

PUBLIC PROGRAM: