Eavesdropping used to be a crime. Now eavesdropping isn’t just legal, it’s ubiquitous. What was once a minor public order offence has become one of the most important politico-legal problems of our time.

Eavesdropping, a collaboration between Liquid Architecture, Melbourne Law School, and the Ian Potter Museum of Art, explores the politics of listening through work by leading artists, researchers, writers, and activists from Australia and around the world. Saturday 4 August you’re invited to a special event at the IMA with performances by Susan Schuppli and Sam Kidel.

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Susan Schuppli: Material Witness
In this performance lecture Susan Schuppli investigates the concept of ‘the material witness’—an entity, object or unit that records and bears witness to events.  Schuppli is a Cana­dian artist, researcher and audio-inves­ti­ga­tor cur­rently asso­ci­ated with the London-based research agency Foren­sic Archi­tec­ture. Over the last twenty years, Schup­pli has returned again and again to the theme of eaves­drop­ping, with a par­tic­u­lar con­cern for the mate­r­ial his­tory and pol­i­tics of audio-tape and the tele­phone.

Sam Kidel: Customer Service Agent
Sam Kidel’s 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.

“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. I am inter­ested in the inti­macy of words and sounds off-script, dis­in­te­grat­ing hold music played through impre­cise tele­phone lines, and dis­rup­tion.”—Sam Kidel

Eavesdropping is presented in partnership with Liquid Architecture, Melbourne Law School and The Ian Potter Museum of Art.