Sarai x LA: Capture All – Liquid Architecture
April–August 2021
Expressions of Interest
due 15 January 2021
Throughout 2021, Liquid Architecture (Melbourne) and Sarai (Delhi) will collaborate to support six artists based in India and Australia through a series of creative and critical workshops, intensives, and dialogues investigating the sonic at a moment of accelerating surveillance capitalism that enmeshes individuals and communities in networks of capture and control.
This opportunity is contextualised and grounded in Sarai’s pioneering work on critical questions of media and information, urbanism, infrastructure, media archaeology, data and law, the commons, and the public domain in South Asia, and in Liquid Architecture’s acclaimed research into sound, surveillance, technology, power and resistance, exemplified in the recent Machine Listening, a curriculum, a critical platform for writing, interviews, music and artworks investigating the dystopian and utopian effects of algorithmic, machinic, networked and technologised listening on our social and political lives.
Capture All extends Sarai and Liquid Architecture’s work via research curators Laura McLean (Liquid Architecture) and Mehak Sawhney’s (Sarai) focus on settler-colonial and post-colonial contexts, considering Australia and India’s complex relationships to coloniality and extraction, and to the sonic transformations across physical and digital spaces in both countries.
We are now seeking expressions of interest from artists, scholars, musicians, programmers, and writers who are interested in how experimental practices of sound and listening can help us understand the entangled networks we live, work, and play in, and develop new forms of critique and intervention. The selected cohort will meet online for workshops, talks, readings, and listening sessions, facilitated by the curators and special guests. Each participant will be encouraged to develop an aspect of their practice or research related to these conversations, and supported in making a public presentation of their work at the conclusion of the program. It is intended that works, ideas, and research developed through Capture All will inform and connect with future iterations of Liquid Architecture’s Machine Listening program at the level of public outcomes.
The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), has been South Asia’s most prominent and productive platform for research and reflection on the transformation of urban space and contemporary realities, especially with regard to cities, data and information, law, and media infrastructures.
Capture All: A Sonic Investigation is a Liquid Architecture and Sarai partnership, supported by Australia Council for the Arts through its International Development team.