Liquid Architecure are curating 4 events for the Melbourne Festival and they look, well, interesting…

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Having just completed their festival in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, Liquid Architecture have returned for more unique sonic explorations, this time as part of the Melbourne Festival. They’ve brought with them some fascinating guests, such as Jordanian artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, German Johannes S. Sistermans, Marcus Rechsteiner (singer from the UV Race), and researchers James Parker and Poppy da Souza. What will they all be doing? Well it’s hard to know exactly, but that’s part of the joy for an oganisation as much concerned about sound as the ideas sound communicates. Below are some of the vaguely illuminating snippets of information from their press release…Good luck…

THE POLITICS OF LISTENING – SAT 17 Oct 2015 – Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) – Free
Berlin-based artist and critical engineer Julian Oliver leads an investigation of signal domains as both techno-political territories and electromagnetic phenomena (GSM, radio and WiFi) It’s an exploration of the radio infrastructure on which we depend: GSM, analog radio (shipping, air traffic, marine) and WiFi. The session will begin with a short talk and discussion of core concepts used for both practical and political readings of the signal spaces we’ll cover. At 3pm, as a concluding event, Julian will build up and operate/perform an installation at the site in the form of a highly specific technological performance to enact the infrastructure ‘speaking itself’, revealing its inner workings and history (an agent of its own rather than a transport/carrier/service).

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Lawrence Abu Hamdan – Aural Contract: The Voice Before The Law – Sunday 18th of October – ACMI – Free
Jordanian artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan examines the contemporary politics of listening – its relationship to power, borders, human rights, testimony and truth – through the production of audio documentaries and essays, installations, sculpture, photography, and performance.

His Aural Contract series investigates the role of the voice in law; the changing nature of testimony in the face of new regimes of border control, algorithmic technology, biomedical science, and modes of surveillance. The Aural Contract works draw from an evolving sound archive – built by the artist – containing extracts of recordings from political and criminal courts, police evidence, films, literature and other sources.

In 2013, Abu Hamdan’s audio documentary The Freedom of Speech Itself was submitted as evidence at the UK asylum tribunal where the artist himself was called to testify as an expert witness.

Liquid Architecture will present a series of audio documentaries from Abu Hamdan’s Aural Contract as a ‘live listening event’ in the cinema setting.

Further developing the theme will be talks by researchers James Parker and Poppy da Souza. Parker’s writing explores legal questions about sound, and sonic questions about the law. Da Souza’s inquiry asks “how listening works, and what listening does, in our post-convergent, post-Snowden, post-privacy moment.”

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Time Out Of Time – Sat Oct 24 – TarraWarra Museum of Art Healesville
Our journey begins and ends on a bus, where UV Race vocalist Marcus Rechsteiner will sing a suite of new and old songs about time, in and out of time – and possibly in and out of tune, and possibly to the tune of Cyndi Lauper’s 1983 hit, Time After Time (here temporarily renamed Time Out of Time). Marcus also has offered to provide commentary of what he sees momentarily passing by the bus windows, in real-time.

In unreal time, Alex Cuffe has come unstuck. The artist will be multiplied, speaking with himselves across a multitude of space dates and timezones.

Saskia Doherty will be speaking to wet clay that is taking on the shape of her voice. As the clay dries, the time of her voice will be imprinted into its setting form. When spectators witness the destruction of the dried clay – both the object and the record contained within it – they will see, and hear, the artist’s voice, literally breaking.

At the same time, German Johannes S. Sistermans will be sounding the moment of time’s creation in a single volcanic basalt-lava stone, (old-) fashioned by a volcano, which he has transported in his rucksack from Germany. Geologically speaking, it’ll be the rock hit of the year (450 billion BCE). As Johannes says, let’s hear it for the ‘~tone al◊ne (read as “stone alone”)’. As Liquid Architecture says, zeitgeist is a German word (to be timely).

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/file/forensic-listening/

Johannes S. Sistermanns: LIFTOFFWEHAVELIFTOFF – Sunday 25th of October – MPaviliion – Melbourne – Free
One body. One temporary pavilion. One afternoon. One kilometre of glad wrap.

Performance is Exhibition, Exhibition Performance, and in between. whole day. ongoing. lines and planes stretching through. several sounds. no loudspeaker. but transducer. piezo membran. the fabric of the MPavilion is first resonance of sound: pillars. floor. air comes second. cling film runs outside crosses finds it lines and planes through leaves connects nature scultpure surroundings. goes upper lower in earth. when and why is dissolved. bluetooth. freed of cables. no other lights. space becomes spatial. and then: glad wrap is threefold: reverberation of sound, reflection of light and transparent for eyes.

More information can be found here.

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Bob is the features editor of Cyclic Defrost. He is also evil. You should not trust the opinions of evil people.

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