Joel Stern
Joel Stern is a researcher, curator, and artist living in Naarm / Melbourne, Australia and Associate Investigator at the RMIT University node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S).
Informed by his background in DIY and experimental music scenes, Stern’s work focusses on how social, political, and technical practices of sound and listening inform and shape our contemporary worlds. In 2013, Stern was appointed Artistic Director of pioneering Australian sonic art organisation Liquid Architecture, a position which he held until 2022. In this capacity Stern has produced and curated numerous festivals, exhibitions, concerts and publications in Australia and internationally, while developing artistic research investigations and programs including Eavesdropping, Machine Listening, Polyphonic Social, Why Listen?, Instrument Builders Project, and Ritual Community Music. In 2020, with fellow artist-researchers Sean Dockray and James Parker, Joel founded Machine Listening, a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation, focused on the political and aesthetic dimensions of the computation of sound and speech.
The collective works across diverse media and modes of production. In addition to research, writing, and artworks, Machine Listening have produced an expanded curriculum, conceived as an experiment in collective learning and community formation; an online library and interview series; numerous on-and-offline events, lectures, performances; and, a browser-based instrument for composing with audio and video via text. Machine Listening emerged out of Stern’s previous work, with James Parker, on Eavesdropping, a multifaceted project staged at Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, and City Gallery, Wellington, addressing the capture and control of our sonic worlds, alongside strategies of resistance. Eavesdropping comprised a touring exhibition, public programs, reading groups and publication, made in collaboration with artists, researchers, writers, and activists from Australia and around the world. This project also formed the basis of Stern’s PhD thesis Eavesdropping: The Politics, Ethics, and Art of Listening in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, completed in 2020.