UNSW Galleries is proud to present three performances by Susan Schuppli, Sam Kidel and Jasmine Guffond, as part of Eavesdropping, a major project by Liquid Architecture, Melbourne Law School and The Ian Potter Museum of Art exploring the politics of listening and being listened-to.

Susan Schuppli: Material Witness
A lecture by Cana­dian artist, researcher, audio-inves­ti­ga­tor and Forensic Architecture asso­ci­ate, Susan Schuppli. 

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.

Sam Kidel: Customer Service Agent
A performance by British artist, musician and researcher Sam Kidel.

Where do you hear my voice? Do you hear it in the bone behind your ear? Does it radi­ate from your chest, towards your shoul­ders and beyond your body? Some­times when I hear a voice over the phone, it vibrates from the speaker at my ear, down the bone to the back of my neck, and sits there, hum­ming, behind my vocal cords. Cus­tomer Ser­vice Agent is a sound per­for­mance piece explor­ing the call centre worker as a figure of sub­jec­tion to con­tem­po­rary cap­i­tal­ism, and the place of noise, inti­macy, and fan­tasy in this tedious, alien­ated work.

Jasmine Guffond: The Web Never Forgets
A browser performance by Sydney-based sound artist and composer, Jasmine Guffond.

Jas­mine Guffond’s The Web Never For­gets traces the his­tory of the Inter­net cookie, plac­ing it at the ori­gins of online auto­mated data cap­ture and sur­veil­lance cap­i­tal­ism.