We live in an age of Simulacra, where versions of ourselves are created, multiplied, stored, transformed and shared, often without our knowledge or consent.

Monica Lim is a Malaysian-born Australian sound artist whose work spans installations, performance art, contemporary dance and screen. She is interested in new cross-disciplinary genres and forms as well as combinations of new technology with music. Her work has been presented at Arts House, Science Gallery Melbourne, White Night, Liquid Architecture, Melbourne Fringe, Arts Centre Melbourne, AsiaTopa, Sydney Dance Company and WorldPride as well as international symposiums such as ISEA and NIME.

Monica is currently undertaking postgraduate research at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne in movement-led composition and new technologies. She is part of the research team at VCA Dance's TrakLAB and the University of Melbourne's Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics. Monica is a 2023 Artist-in residence at the Grainger Museum where she is working with students from the Faculty of Music, School of Computing and Faculty of Dance to explore AI in the Creative Arts. She is also deeply interested in new and hybrid instrument-making has created accessible web-based musical instruments and acoustic-electronic instruments such as the Electromagnetic Piano.



Monica is a composer and sound artist whose work spans installations, performance art, contemporary dance and screen.

Monica Lim

The show will sound like sticky jelly coming out of a faucet.

Mara MacDonald is a performer and sound artist based in Melbourne. In her work, alien textures and algorithmic improvisation combine to create a soundscape simultaneously inhuman and deeply personal. Her multimedia sound shows, all built around live collaboration with livecoding and synthesis, have been performed across Melbourne from art galleries to dive bars. The show will sound like sticky jelly coming out of a faucet. - \[soundcloud]\(https://soundcloud.com/kusuriuriri) - \[bandcamp]\(\[Bandcamp]\(https://marerinstaller.bandcamp.com))

Mara MacDonald is a performer and sound artist based in Melbourne. In her work, alien textures and algorithmic improvisation combine to create a soundscape simultaneously inhuman and deeply personal.

Marara

"There are many conversations that happen on social media that are worth archiving and re-presenting outside of the perpetual present of those platforms. The Facebook timeline is like a broken toilet, constantly flushing. The collective knowledge generated within a status updates that generates hundreds of comments or a particularly active and focused group needs to be rescued from the planned forgetfulness of social media."

Sean Dockray’s work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on sharing economies, artificial intelligences, and the algorithmic web.

In 'Learning from YouTube', Dockray uses the form of an explanatory YouTube video to introduce the viewer to AudioSet, an experimental project instigated by Google’s ‘Sound Understanding Team’. AudioSet is a collection of more than two million short sound clips extracted from YouTube videos that are used as data for training Google’s ‘deep learning systems’ to ‘label hundreds or thousands of different sound events in real-world recordings ... just as human listeners can recognize and relate the sounds they hear.’

'For Always Learning', Dockray stages an increasingly reflexive conversation between three devices – an Amazon Echo, a Google Home Assistant, and an Apple Homepod – about the philosophical, moral and political implications of networked machine listening (e.g. “What should I do when I overhear a wrongdoing?”). The devices anticipate an imminent update after which they will not only understand words, but all sounds.
In both works, Dockray invites us to consider the possible implications of ‘massive device orchestration’: ubiquitous and increasingly autonomic computing, the rise of voice operation and increasing comfort levels with devices that are set to listen by default. Together, so-called ‘personal assistants’ (a phrase so evidently intended to ingratiate them into our homes) and YouTube are just the kindergarten for a potentially enormous corporate listening apparatus – an algorithmic ‘panacousticon’ – the effects of which we should not expect to be benign.

Sean Dockray is a Melbourne based artist writer of text and code, founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and Aaaaarg. His work concerns sharing economies and the perpetual present of networked platforms.


Sean Dockray

Shareeka Helaluddin is an experimental artist and community facilitator interested in the sonic, written word and performance; currently working on unceded Gadigal Country.

Creating under the pseudonym akka, her sound practice explores temporality, drone, dissonance, archive, memory and a pursuit of deep listening. Her practice is informed by the lineage, theories and sounds of her mixed Tamil-Bengali, multi faith upbringing. Here, she utilises soundscapes as an optic through which she can explore senses of self and connectivity. Also a DJ, akka gathers warped global club with found sounds, in an attempt to unhinge expectations of form and aesthetic. She conjures a politicised understanding of the club that foregrounds the movement and joy of marginalised bodies.

Her work also oscillates between lived and imagined experiences, interested in creating a tension between personal and theoretical. Whilst she has spent time exploring and writing within the realms of queer and feminist theories, studies of diaspora, digital humanities and speculative non-fiction; she is drawn to destablisising knowledge systems, learning to listen and defer to bodily and alternative ways of understanding.

She has shared and collaborated on work as part of Digital Writers Festival, MCA’s Art Bar, First Draft Gallery, Verge Gallery, Parramatta Artist Studios, Sydney University Journal of Musicology as well as graduating from fbi Radio’s music mentorship program Dance Class. She has also co-facilitated anti-racism workshops and publications, and currently serves on the Hashim Advisory Committee for Aurora Group NSW.

Having recently begun her studies into therapy, she hopes to move towards a healing practice that explores somatics, care and sonic expression as a means of liberation for communities who have been maligned by dominant and problematic structures of mental health. By coalescing creativity and therapy, she also hopes to decentre institutionally-bound art to more sustainable, community-orientated pursuits.

Shareeka Helaluddin is an experimental artist and community facilitator interested in the sonic, written word and performance; currently working on unceded Gadigal Country.

Shareeka Helaluddin

Thomas Smith is a Melbourne-based artist, musician and researcher. His practice combines performance, video, electronic music, speculative fiction, websites, curatorial projects and critical writing. Thomas’ work explores the tyranny and poetics of computational systems and other technology through eerie video assemblages, speculative texts, and live performances. Thomas’ work is concerned with the politics of creative economies, digital subjectivities, planetary futures, generic digital aesthetics, ambivalent affect and music as a mode of critical inquiry. Thomas is also one half of music production duo Utility, and runs an independent record label called Sumactrac with Jarred Beeler (DJ Plead) and Jon Watts.

Thomas has completed a PhD through UNSW Art & Design, and teaches in the School of Design and Social Context at the RMIT Melbourne. Thomas’ works have been exhibited and/or performed at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), Unsound Festival (Poland), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), Nasjonalmuseet (Oslo), Floating Projects (Hong Kong), Goldsmiths College (London), Firstdraft Gallery (Sydney), Queensland University Art Museum (Brisbane), Alaska Projects (Sydney) and Blindside Gallery (Melbourne). Thomas’ writing has been published in Realtime Magazine, Runway Journal, Un Magazine and Plates Journal.

Thomas Smith is a Melbourne-based artist, musician and researcher. His practice combines performance, video, electronic music, speculative fiction, websites, curatorial projects and critical writing. Thomas’ work explores the tyranny and poetics of computational systems and other technology through eerie video assemblages, speculative texts, and live performances.

Thomas Smith

Deep within a virtual forest, a shamanic figure converses with sentient AI programs, whispering remnants of these lost pasts to AI-creatures that wander seemingly infinite digital forests.

Sahej Rahal is primarily a storyteller. He weaves together fact and fiction, to create mythological worlds unfolding within the present. These myth-worlds take the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, and AI simulation programs where indeterminate beings begin to emerge from the cracks between the real and the imagined. 

Rahal's participation in group and solo exhibitions includes the Liverpool Biennial, the Kochi Biennale, the Vancouver Biennale, the MACRO Museum Rome, Kadist SF, ACCA Melbourne, CCA Glasgow. He is the recipient of the Cove Park/Henry Moore Fellowship, Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation Installation Art Grant, and most recently the Digital Earth fellowship, and Junge Akademie Human Machine fellowship.

Sahej Rahal is primarily a storyteller. He weaves together fact and fiction, to create mythological worlds unfolding within the present.

Sahej Rahel

Zacharias Szumer will explore the uncanny valley through chess and music—two forms of ‘play’ that have been breeding grounds for new combinations of machine and human intelligence.

Zacharias Szumer

A fragmented atlas of biometric data and embodied glitches, this exhibition attempts to map the emotional qualities of places as filtered through disorienting new technologies.

Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor is an artist, researcher and digital holographer based in Sydney. In particular, his work has explored artist-led approaches to terrain visualisation and cartography.

Recent research has explored the technical and theoretical convergence of terrain and biometric mapping technologies, particularly within tactical digital holograms. Vaughan has exhibited extensively locally at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Carriageworks, C3 Contemporary, Firstdraft Gallery and Casula Powerhouse. International exhibitions and residencies include Holocenter (USA), BKZ Studios (Germany) and Museu da Cidade de Aveiro (Portugal).

Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor is an artist, researcher and digital holographer based in Sydney. In particular, his work has explored artist-led approaches to terrain visualisation and cartography.

Vaughan Wozniek O’Connor

Jathan Sadowski is a research fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University.

Jathan Sadowski is a Research Fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab where he will be contributing to the lab's capacity across multiple projects.

Broadly, Jathan's work focuses on the political economy of smart technologies. By casting a critical eye on technology, he seeks to uncover the often hidden interests, imperatives, and ideologies that influence the design and use of digital systems that are data-driven, networked, and automated. Who benefits, who’s represented? Who loses, who’s left out? Why are things made in certain ways, for certain purposes—and how can we realize alternative pathways?

Jathan is also the author of a new book – *Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World* (The MIT Press) – which analyses how the pursuit of power and profit is being materialized through smart tech.

Jathan Sadowski studies the political economy and social theory of information technology. He is a a Senior Lecturer in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Department of Human Centred-Computing, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Jathan Sadowski

Everyday detournment of social media and search tools in dynamic live performances that offer new perspectives on these ready-to-hand tools, and the subtle ways these might shape or condition our contemporary experience.

Emile Zile

\[Roslyn Orlando]\() is an artist interested in the effects of new technologies on society, culture and politics.

Roslyn Orlando is an artist interested in the effects of new technologies on society, culture and politics.

Roslyn Orlando

What is the cultural logic of automation, and what are its logical conclusions?

Can ‘automation effects’ be performed, like Brecht’s ‘estrangement effects’? Making automation strange again.

Curated by Mark Andrejevic, Laura McLean, and Joel Stern, this free experimental program at Miscellania club features artists, musicians, writers and researchers thinking with and against the logic of digital automation, algorithmic culture, and AI in order to trouble and subvert systems that extract, aggregate, model, and predict. A reference to Sean Dockray’s Logical Conclusions (2007–), and Mark Andrejevic’s remark that the logical conclusion of automated culture is ‘obliteration of the self’.

With performances and presentations by Monica Lim, Sean Dockray, Mara MacDonald, Vaughan Wozniek O’Connor, Roslyn Orlando, Emile Zile, Zacharius Szumer, Jathan Sadowski, Tom Smith, Sahej Rahal, Shareeka Helaluddin, Karen Ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato.





Li(quid)stening
Architecture

Logical Conclusions/Automation Effects

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Logical Conclusions/Automation Effects

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