Joel Stern is an Australian researcher, curator and artist. His interest in sound came to him when he was a teenager listening to community based local radio stations, especially graveyard shifts, listening to long form minimal, avant-guard experimental music. He joined a media and technology course in Melbourne, where he collaborated with students, articulating ideas across the boundaries of different mediums. He felt at that time, something new was happening in the world of art, focusing on new technologies and techniques. He studied sound arts at London college of printing and began to see sound as an important genre of art. Stern feels this time was extremely formative for him, partly due to the improvised and experimental music scenes in London.
Stern took on the artistic direction of liquid architecture in 2013. It’s the key sonic arts organisation in Australia, it formed in the late 90s out of the interdisciplinary practice in the royal Melbourne institute of technology. At the time it was a national touring festival of sonic art. It had a Eurocentric, modernist experimental approach to sonic art with concert and exhibition as the key formats.
When he took on the role he dissolved the festival format, he wanted to work on projects at any scale at any time, he wanted to be more ‘formally experimental’. By 2014/15, under his direction liquid architecture had become a year round venture consisting of all kinds of formats.
What would a Feminist methodology sound like? This is how Joel describes his curatorial methodology for sound, he puts emphasis on the politics and ethics of listening. Stern sees curating and curatorial research as a from of knowledge production, trying to map out a particular terrain. Joel’s aim was to cultivate a feminist culture within the organisation, to create a radically inclusive environment and set a template for liquid architecture for years to come. Stern thinks not in terms of singular events or projects but in terms of investigation into methodologies for sound production in a political space.
Eavesdropping and machine listening was a research project for Joels PHD. It was fundamentally a collaboration with James Parker who had been thinking about sound through the prism of a critical legal perspective. For example, the ways in which law tries to regulate and control sound, and the way that societies and structures operate with it such as the weaponisation of sound. The word eavesdropping is relevant because of its history, it describes a crime or public wrong. Stern and Parker wanted to think about what the history of eavesdropping can tell us about the practice today. They hoped that researching the history of eavesdropping would illuminate how todays social political landscape is affected by it.
The Manus recording project is about a detention centre on Manus Island off the coast of Papua New Guinea that is controlled by the Australian government. This work was a collaboration between Michael Green, Andre Dao and Jon Tjhia. Michael was contacted by a prisoner detained in this centre through a phone he had smuggled in. Due to the intermittent internet connection, the prisoner would prerecord messages, these messages became the content of a podcast called the messenger. It’s a sonic representation of the prison population. Joel approached these artists and asked if they would create a piece for the eavesdropping project, this piece came to be called ‘How are you today?’ They smuggled 6 audio recorders into the detention centre with phones loaded with credit. This was to give the prisoners a means to record a ten minute recording and send it to Joel and his colleagues, they did this daily. They then created an exhibition where these recordings would be played. There is also an online bank of these recordings, they total 14 hours of speech. Some of the recordings ask us to listen to the men, and some ask us to listen with the men to their surrounding sounds. I find it interesting that they didn’t try to create a narrative, its more a documentary take, an unfiltered window into the experience of people who normally would not have a voice, not be listened to or with. The piece is a vessel for the audience to eavesdrop on something we are not meant to hear.
The main pieces of advice I took from Joel Stern’s lecture is think about how you can make audible, what was previously inaudible. When you make a piece about something, consider why you use sound, does it reveal something extra or communicate an account or idea in a way that couldn’t be done through another medium?