Active since 2000, Liquid Architecture is a leading Australian organisation for artists working with sound and listening, based on unceded Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Our program sits at the intersection of contemporary art and experimental music, expressed through a range of research, commissioning, presentation, and publishing activities.
In 2019 Liquid Architecture founded Disclaimer, a new digital journal for reading and writing on listening and sound. Our editorial approach incorporates work by artists, writers, activists, and researchers, expanding on our public programming, while generating entirely new possibilities for critical sound-oriented work: audio papers, digital listening interfaces, artist-on-artist profiles and interviews, visual and sonic scores, research essays and investigations, poetry, sonic archives, experiments in audio description, and more.
In addition to standalone pieces, we publish edited dossiers exploring themes central to Liquid Architecture’s curatorial agenda, and our position that sound and listening are always inherently political, relational, situated, and contextual subjects. Disclaimer extends Liquid Architecture’s prolific and collaborative research methodology and longstanding desire to enrich, entangle, and charge the experience of reading with the force of listening.
Below we share some recently published materials from Disclaimer:
“Listening with the Fingers” is a material archive documenting and expanding on Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña’s visit to Australia in late 2016. This dossier incorporates performances, readings, interviews, and collaborations conducted in Melbourne and rural Tasmania with collaborators including Camila Marambio and Douglas Kahn; alongside poetry readings sent via voicemail from Vicuña to the dossier’s editors, Joel Stern and Autumn Royal, in late 2020.
“Sitting by the Fence near the Jungle: Reflections on the Manus Recording Project Collective” is a collection of writing on the groundbreaking work of Manus Recording Project Collective, comprised of a group of refugees who have documented Australia’s off-and-onshore immigration detention regimes from the inside, through practices of field recording and the production of audio archives. Edited by Liquid Architecture associate and legal scholar James Parker, the dossier features essays, interviews, and creative reflections by James Parker and Joel Stern, André Dao and Behrouz Boochani, Poppy de Souza, Andrew Brooks, and Emma K. Russell. Recordings from crucial works by the Manus Recording Project Collective how are you today (2018) and where are you today (2020), originally commissioned by Liquid Architecture, are embedded throughout, so that reading and listening remain in direct dialogue.
“Unsettling Scores,” co-commissioned by Liquid Architecture and Monash University Museum of Art, is a dossier led by First Nations artists from around the world that examines how acts of sound and listening — grounded in the language of musical scores — become vehicles for disrupting the logics of settlerism, extractivism, expropriation, and appropriation, while at the same time offers powerful assertions of sovereignty, resistance, and futurity. Featuring work by artists and scholars including: Megan Cope, Dylan Robinson, Candice Hopkins and Raven Chacon, Rob Thorne, and Proposals from the Future.
Further recent highlights from Disclaimer include:
“Iterations: John Nixon,” Tiarney Miekus
“Inhuman Intelligence: Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst in conversation with Sean Dockray”
“The Hegemony of the DAW,” Micheal Terren
“Haig Aivazian in conversation with Noah Simblist”
“Sonaflora Drift scores,” Dylan Martorell
“The Test of Time: Clare 'CRIM' Cooper,” Jim Denley
Editor Liang Luscombe invites ideas and proposals for Disclaimer at any time, submissions here. If you would like to support Liquid Architecture’s publishing activities including Disclaimer, and our podcast, you can do so through a monthly Patreon subscription.
