Speculative Noise w/ mekema, cyberBanshee & Unregistered Master Builder

Join us for a night of speculative noise, as we invite three local artists to respond through sound to Amanda Bennetts' exhibition, 'Stealth Care: Wellness from the Algorithm'. 

The exhibition presents a suite of gelatinous, biodata ornaments, glimmering video with accompanying drones, barrels of data echoes, and a myriad of plush offerings, situating it somewhere between clinical healthcare scene and sensual wellness space.

It's a stark environment, presenting more questions than answers, and we're excited to facilitate sonic responses from characters in the community landscape each with their own nuanced relationships to healthcare, disability, technology and sound.

BAR OPEN: 6pm
PERFORMANCES: 6pm - 8pm
ACCESS: Wheelchair access via main entrance on Brunswick St. This event will be brightly lit, and may feature moments of loud noise. 

About the artists

Han Reardon-Smith (they/them) is a white settler of Welsh and disconnected Turkish heritage, and is a musicker, radio/podcast producer, community organiser, and thinker-scholar living on the unceded land of the Yuggera Ugarapul and Turrbal Peoples.  Their work and thinking are rooted in queer/trans and disabled collaborative and contaminative co-creation, exploring the emergent possibilities of making-kin and finding agency within community (soundmaking as kinmaking: musickin).

Mekema makes minimal, lo-fi electronic ambient and experimental sounds using modular synths, open-source electronics and other idiosyncratic devices. Working with sound to explore context and emergent properties through repetition in structure and motifs, performances and sound works endeavour to create changes in perception. Process is fundamental to the sound of the project – asynchronous loopers and autogenerated melodic fragments are used to create complex and evolving patterns - feedback patches of analogue equipment explore the boundaries of grace and chaos - poly rhythmic phasing explores the pulsing interaction between frequencies. The project is guided by the pursuit of minimalism.

Joseph’s creative practice rests at the axis between textiles, motion and sound. Joseph has contributed to projects across Europe, North-America, the Middle-East and Australia. Most recently deploying projects with Atelier Sisu (AU) and Barcelona-based Onion Labs (ES) as an animator and sound artist. Currently residing in Meanjin, Joseph is a director of KEPK and has focused on curating long-form durational sound projects and experimental showcases. Joseph is currently undertaking a Master’s by research exploring the interface between romantic-era technology and the absence of sound in modern-carpet making.

About the exhibition

Stealth Care: Wellness from the Algorithm invites visitors into the spectral spaces where AI, health data, and artistic and scientific research converge, interrogating the porous boundaries where data ownership and algorithmic agency bleed into the realities of healthcare and wellness industries. This immersive, multi-sensory installation is born from six months of cross-disciplinary research in Austria with Ars Electronica x IT:U, and harnesses machine learning and Bennetts’ personal, ‘non-normative’ crip and chronically ill bio-data as a foundational research element. Can the quantified self serve the ill body? As someone with an extensive medical data profile, Bennetts sought to understand when her biological data becomes the focal point, separated from non-normative measurements and untethered from the exploitation of third-party health data frameworks; what will it unveil?

Amanda Bennetts is a new media and installation artist based on the Sunshine Coast (Kabi Kabi Country). Living with a progressive neurological disease and a rare muscular disease, Bennetts harnesses her lived experience to critically explore themes of care, illness, and disability. Her work probes the politically charged and socially determined realms of living as an ill body, creating large immersive installations that blend materiality with emerging technology, video, sound, and mass-produced objects within clinical and disability aesthetics.