Melbourne Art Foundation presents the 2016 Lectures and Forums Program in
association with Liquid Architecture and the Research Unit in Public Cultures (RUPC) –
University of Melbourne, at the Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture from18 to 20 August 2016.

This year’s program is an expanded symposium encompassing talks, music,
performances and experiments.

By necessity, we tune in to some signals, and filter others out. In determining what is
signal and what is noise, listening is political - all listening, all the time. As is looking:
when we focus, we sharpen the subject, and exclude the rest. Consigned to the
back, signals nonetheless continue to vibrate, permeating through the social and the
architectural, into the atmospheric.

We want to stage a conversation about sound, art and public space. What if our own
practices echo those of the larger forces that filter, groom and autotune political and
aesthetic consensus? What do we hear when our listening is less selective? What
processes transmit, in the background, and what alternative tuning would receive them?

How might we amplify our own complicity in the correction of rogue expressions? Who is
most guilty of saying nothing?

This experimental symposium brings together thinkers and performers across sound
and art to consider:
— Disharmony between percept and concept
— Zero-sum games: art v state; non-state art; art’s non-state(s)
— Industrial culture in the culture industries
— (Music in) the spaces of art - on galleriability and ambient spectacularity
— Hatred of music; or the more unmusical the