How can sound and listening be mobilised for understanding questions of power, capture, and extraction under networked capitalism and data colonialism?
Capture All is a multiyear collaboration, beginning in 2021, between Liquid Architecture (Melbourne) and Sarai (Delhi), featuring artists, scholars, and writers based in India and Australia contributing to a series of critical intensives and dialogues, public programs and publications.
This project is contextualised by Sarai’s pioneering work on media and information, urbanism, infrastructure, media archaeology, data and law, the commons, and the public domain in South Asia, and in Liquid Architecture’s ongoing research projects, including ‘Machine Listening’, a constantly evolving platform investigating the effects of algorithmic, machinic, networked and technologised listening on our social and political lives.
Led by research curators Laura McLean (Liquid Architecture) and Mehak Sawhney (Sarai), Capture All considers Australia and India’s complex relationships to coloniality and extraction across physical and digital spaces. We are interested in; how sonic data is extracted, exploited, monetised, and used to govern user behavior; the thresholds of public and private sound, mobile phones and social media, voice interfaces, biometrics, and sonic databases; forensic listening; the economics of data-labour and listening-labour; streaming music cultures; new acoustic ecologies; and sonic modes of evasion and resistance.
In the midst of the profound mediatisation of interpersonal relations, collapsing distinctions between online and offline, local and global engagements - this project sets out to critically inhabit ‘immaterial’ spaces and consider the value and agency of our online and offline togetherness.
PROGRAM PARTNERS
For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture and Sarai have operated at the forefront of media and sound practice and research.
Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening. Its program stages encounters and creates spaces for sonic experience, and critical reflection on sonority and systems of sonic affect.
The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), has been South Asia’s most prominent and productive platform for research and reflection on the transformation of urban space and contemporary realities, especially with regard to cities, data and information, law, and media infrastructures.
