a listening practice
My sound and listening practice cuts across research, creative practice, and community partnerships.
Interviews recorded on the water with Uncle Andrew Gardiner (Wurundjeri Elder, Birrarung Council), Charity Mosienyane (Lead Convenor, Regen Melbourne) and Dr Erin O'Donnell (University of Melbourne, Birrarung Council), on stewardship, river connection and restoration of the Birrarung, composed into an audio work.
Major commission for Vivid Sydney 2022, a 130-metre projection along the Powerhouse Museum, the festival's longest artwork, reimagining over 30 film and sound recordings from 1908 onwards as a collective dreamscape of the city's transformation.
Over 20 audio-visual portraits of the change-makers driving transformation across Australian cities, established and emerging urban leaders on city-making, sustainable futures and legacy, produced remotely with Studio THI through the COVID lockdowns.
A permanent cultural activation at Port Macquarie's historic courthouse, led by Birpai Elder Aunty Rhonda Radley and the Ngarrgan-Mirriiyn Choir, truth-telling and weaving workshops distilled into a commemorative digital artwork situating the town's bicentenary within Birpai storytelling.
An immersive sound installation weaving site-specific archival field recordings through the canopy of living trees, premiered at Brisbane's Botanica Festival and toured to Melbourne, Vivid Sydney and regional NSW destinations.
Audio-visual interpretation for the Mt Stromlo Observatory Director’s Residence restoration. Winner, Outstanding Heritage Award, National Trust ACT.
Large-scale projections onto urban architecture are an increasingly established form of public art, dazzling audiences and re-narrating the places and structures they are projected onto. This article examines one such projection work, Thinking Spaces, a two-week installation on the campus of the Australian National University in 2013.
On the different auditory spaces of the modern city, including those produced by smartphones, and what they reveal about the experience of urbanisation and technological modernisation.
This article is interested in how a tuning of the ear toward the auditory qualities of urban life presents new encounters with the historical geographies of the city and its spaces of technological modernity. It identifies the way a heightened appreciation of the auditory domain has helped disclose different ways of conceptually approaching the experience of urbanization and technological modernity during the 20th century.
Soundscape accompanying a series of projection installations meditating on the history of the ANU campus, staged over two weeks in 2013. Written up with Shanti Sumartojo as When One Idea Led to Another in The Senses and Society.
A major Art & About commission for the City of Sydney, staged in Martin Place and Rowe Street. The work summoned the Hotel Australia and the vanished Rowe Street arcade back into the streets that replaced them, using archival recordings and voices of the people who drank, worked and shopped there. The installation is long gone, but the soundscapes survive and can still be listened to.
Negotiated the release of ABC television and radio archive material under CC BY 2.0 through ABC Pool. This moved broadcast recordings out of a closed archive and into public circulation, where they could be listened to, reused and rebuilt on. The recordings gathered here under Voices came out of this program.
Real-time city technologies reimagined as connection points to the "real times of space", ambient sound archives used to create mobile listening experiences that reveal contested spatial histories.
September 2010.
On the ABC's first location-based service, built from the broadcaster's television and radio archives, presented to the British Library's conference on opening sound collections, 20–21 March 2009.
From the doctoral research, the ABC's first foray into location-based services, built from ambient sound recordings of events and locations no longer visible. An archaeology of Sydney's invisible topography, which locates its recorded action rather than surviving artefact.
Research fellowship at the NFSA's Centre for Archival and Scholarly Research, working with the national audiovisual collection. The archival listening methods developed here carried into the doctoral research and into Sydney Sidetracks.
Nothing of that kind here yet.
Archival recordings carried out of closed collections and into public circulation. Not my compositions: other people's voices, surfaced so they can be listened to and built on. Most are public because of Past Forward, a partnership with ABC Pool negotiated in 2012 that released ABC television and radio archive material under CC BY 2.0.