"The eavesdropping threat loomed large during the 1950s and 1960s: in the work of state and local law enforcement agencies, who wiretapped extensively in criminal investigations; in the exploits of private investigators and eavesdropping specialists, who capitalized on technological innovations to expand their industry's reach; and, perhaps most importantly, in the contradictions of state and federal lawmakers, who sent conflicting messages about the legitimacy of eavesdropping practices that had dogged the nation's communications infrastructure for more than a century."

\> "The eavesdropping threat loomed large during the 1950s and 1960s: in the work of state and local law enforcement agencies, who wiretapped extensively in criminal investigations; in the exploits of private investigators and eavesdropping specialists, who capitalized on technological innovations to expand their industry's reach; and, perhaps most importantly, in the contradictions of state and federal lawmakers, who sent conflicting messages about the legitimacy of eavesdropping practices that had dogged the nation's communications infrastructure for more than a century." \*'Eavesdropping in the Age of The Eavesdroppers; or, The Bug in the Martini Olive', Post45\* --- Brian will be giving a public lecture entitled \*\*\[The Uninvited Ear: Wiretapping, an All American History ]\(https://eavesdropping.exposed/events/brian-hochman-the-uninvited-ear-wiretapping-an-all-american-history)\*\*on Friday 27 July at 6pm at Melbourne Law School. (image: detectifone\_-3\_carl-anderson-electric-corp\_1917-copy.jpg)

Brian Hochman

"I dial a number into the phone. Someone picks up, and I follow the script. In between words, saliva rolls around my mouth folding around air pockets that pop quietly. The person on the other end of the line breathes more heavily than I expect, occasionally blowing directly into the phone handset, rattling the microphone and sending the sound of a strong gale down the wires of their telephone line. The sound travels through the microphone, into the grid, across vast networks of wires, into the call centre, through the telephone speaker cone and into my ear. I almost feel the warmth of their breath on the back of my neck."

"I dial a number into the phone. Someone picks up, and I follow the script. In between words, saliva rolls around my mouth folding around air pockets that pop quietly. The person on the other end of the line breathes more heavily than I expect, occasionally blowing directly into the phone handset, rattling the microphone and sending the sound of a strong gale down the wires of their telephone line. The sound travels through the microphone, into the grid, across vast networks of wires, into the call centre, through the telephone speaker cone and into my ear. I almost feel the warmth of their breath on the back of my neck." Since working in call centres for a decade, I have been making art that explores this setting through sound. Call centres are places of constant eavesdropping: the workers listen to the callers, the team leaders listen to the workers, the managers listen to all. While centres collect and transmit certain types of ‘signal’, I’m interested in ‘noise’: the intimacy of words and sounds off-script, disintegrating hold music played through imprecise telephone lines, and disruption. Beyond the precarity of typical call centre contracts, an additional spectre haunts the call centre’s future: automation through voice recognition and voice synthesis. Voice recognition systems seek to isolate signal from noise, but they are vulnerable to noisy speech, and speech-like noise. These vulnerabilities are possibilities. (image: sketch.png) (image: sketch-2.png) I see the call centre worker (or, customer service agent) as a figure of our time: precarious, entrapped, alienated, pending-automation.

Sam Kidel

"The relative invisibility of digital surveillance and the proliferation of consumer modes of online surveillance has both intensified and rendered ambivalent our relationships to being surveyed. Sound provides a means for listening back to some of the imperceivable surveillance infrastructures that monitor our habitual online browsing."

Jasmine Guffond

WORKS: The Missing 18 1/2 Minutes; Listening to Answering Machines
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"The material witness — an entity (object or unit) whose physical properties or technical configuration records evidence of passing events to which it can bear witness. Whether these events register as a by-product of an unintentional encounter or as an expression of direct action, history and by extension politics is registered at these junctures of ontological intensity. Moreover, in disclosing these encoded events, the material witness makes ‘evident’ the very conditions and practices that convert such eventful materials into matters of evidence."

\\>"The material witness — an entity (object or unit) whose physical properties or technical configuration records evidence of passing events to which it can bear witness. Whether these events register as a by-product of an unintentional encounter or as an expression of direct action, history and by extension politics is registered at these junctures of ontological intensity. Moreover, in disclosing these encoded events, the material witness makes ‘evident’ the very conditions and practices that convert such eventful materials into matters of evidence." \*\*\*Material Witness\*\*, (MIT Press, forthcoming)\* --- Two works by Schuppli feature in Eavesdropping. \*\*1. The Missing 18 1/2 Minutes\*\* (image: 4-equipment-in-court\\\_retouche.jpg) 'The Missing 18 ½ Minutes' is the most recent iteration of a long-term investigation into Watergate. At some point during the evening of 20 June 1972, a conversation between two men was secretly taped on a SONY TC-800B reel-to-reel voice recorder. Tape 342, as it is officially referred to, is but one of a sprawling archive of approximately 3,700 hours of audio recordings taped surreptitiously by the late American President Richard Nixon over a period of several years. Of the many audiotapes confiscated from the Oval Office, Tape 342 remains by far the most infamous. Not because of the shocking information it contains, but precisely because of its absence: an 18-and-a-half minute gap that occurs at 6 hours, 21 minutes, and 26 seconds of recorded material. A residual silence that is still haunted by the spectre of a President who refused to speak on the grounds that such testimony might be self-incriminatory. In 1973, Nixon’s loyal secretary Rose Mary Woods testified that she was responsible for this gap and told an elaborate story about how the telephone rang whilst she was transcribing the Tape causing her foot pedal controlled UHER tape recorder to accidentally press the wrong button and erase the tape. Her ‘re-enactment’ of this infamous event for the federal grand jury is captured in the photo mural shown here, which is more commonly referred to as the “Rose Mary Stretch”. With the advent of digitisation, press bureaus started dumping their wire service images en masse. From these discarded images, Schuppli has collected all that relate to the legal proceedings of Watergate Tape 342 during which 18-and-a-half minutes of noisy silence was put on trial. These archival materials are re-presented here as a photographic timeline accompanied by an audio listening station where one can listen to the actual 18-and-a-half-minute gap in Watergate Tape 342, which has been sourced from the US National Archives and Records Administration. While this installation addresses the emergence of wiretapping and state surveillance within the political context of the 1970s, specifically around the defining events of Watergate, it is also set against the backdrop of current events in which practices of data harvesting (e.g. Cambridge Analytica/Facebook) have become commonplace. \*\*2. Listening to Answering Machines\*\* (image: outgoing-msg.jpg) 'Listening to Answering Machines' explores a collection of recordings gathered by Schuppli from thrift stores and charity shops following the transition to digital-voicemail in the 1990s: each tape is an accidental archive encompassing details about both the person who owned the machine, and all the people who reached out to them by leaving their messages behind. No doubt they never considered that their shared sonic intimacies might one day be sold off as mere detritus (the dead technological remains of domestic life), let alone imagine that their incoming messages and conversational fragments might make their way into the hands of others. Entire worlds and personal portraits are captured by the network of calls and messages left behind on such tapes. 'Listening to Answering Machines' invites us to explore these worlds and in doing so queries the transgression that listening to the sonic intimacies of strangers might provoke at a time when this form of listening has been scaled-up and routinised by always-on smartphones and other devices designed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations.

Susan Schuppli

wire­tap­ping, the sonic epis­teme, sonic agency, exces­sive lis­ten­ing, foren­sic lis­ten­ing

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.

OVERHEAR is the first of four movements spanning the exhibition, with SILICON EAR, EARWITNESS and LISTEN BACK to follow.

Li(quid)stening
Architecture

EAVESDROPPING: OVERHEAR

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EAVESDROPPING: OVERHEAR

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