Konvolute (hate speech), 2026
Audio, audio-video, and live performance.
Presented at: Absorb(ed) V Festival, Miscellania, Naarm/Melbourne.
For the final Absorb(ed) at Miscellania, Machine Listening performed Konvolute (hate speech), utop the Miscellania Rooftop. The work debuted a new software developed with Sean Dockray, designed to cut, analyse, and reassemble audio and video archives in radical and revealing ways. The system performs a kind of ‘parliamentary bounce’ for messed-up times. Against a backdrop of newly intensified and murky hate speech legislation in Australia, Machine Listening took clips from broadcasts, online videos, parliamentary streams and cut, reassembled and remixed them through machinic processes.
At the centre of the performance is Konvolute, a custom-built instrument for navigating datasets according to machinic parameters. Drawing on techniques from speech recognition and music information retrieval, Konvolute organises audiovisual material using MFCCs (Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient), mapping complex, higher-dimensional feature spaces into two-dimensional projections. Konvolute maps higher-dimensional MFCC space into 2D projections, plotting courses through them, letting us hear computers trying to listen like humans.
