"Our devices are listening to us". A lecture-performance by Naarm Melbourne collective Machine Listening which processes critical texts about AI in real time. Limit: 30 Registrations

What kind of planet would the planetisation of machine listening make? Microphones and loudspeakers are being laced through the biosphere. AI systems monitor forests, oceans, reefs and skies, all in the name of a cybernetic ecology. But who governs this listening infrastructure? Who is heard, and what does it even mean to be heard? What is unheard?

Presented by CIRCUIT in partnership with The Pyramid Club, this lecture-performance by Naarm Melbourne collective Machine Listening — James Parker, Joel Stern and Sean Dockray — bring together ideas from Parker's text The Planetization of Machine Listening (2025) and the collective's audiovisual instrument Konvolute, a tool for composing with cut-up video and environmental datasets in real time. The three artists will critically feed the essay’s argument back through performance and media improvisation to complicate it, testing the lecture’s claims against the grain of the material, letting the software push back, introduce noise, and open questions the words alone cannot quite hold.

Machine Listening is a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation, founded in 2020 by Sean Dockray, James Parker, and Joel Stern to subject automated systems to political and aesthetic scrutiny. The collective works across writing, installation, performance, music, software, curation, pedagogy, and radio.

Their work has been presented at major institutions including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Cricoteka Tadeusz Kantor Museum (Kraków), Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, Galerie Nord (Berlin), the National Communication Museum, RMIT Design Hub, and MUMA. They have performed at Unsound Festival, Soft Centre, and Melbourne Recital Centre, among others.

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