Environmentality

Audio Foundation poster for the first stop on our north island tour of our lecture-performance Environmentality (2026)

What kind of planet would the planetisation of machine listening make? Microphones and loudspeakers are being laced through the biosphere. AI systems monitor forests, oceans, reefs and skies, all in the name of a cybernetic ecology. But who governs this listening infrastructure? Who is heard, and what does it even mean to be heard? What is unheard?

In this lecture-performance presented in response to their installation Environments 12, Machine Listening — James Parker, Joel Stern and Sean Dockray — bring together ideas from Parker’s text The Planetization of Machine Listeningand the collective’s audiovisual instrument Konvolute, a tool for composing with cut-up video and environmental datasets in real time. The three artists will critically feed the essay’s argument back through performance and media improvisation to complicate it, testing the lecture’s claims against the grain of the material, letting the software push back, introduce noise, and open questions the words alone cannot quite hold.

Presentations:

• Environmentality, Audio Foundation, Auckland, Aotearoa, 25 June 2026.
• Environmentality, as part of Opening Day Programme for Direct Bodily Empathy — Sound, Signal, Feedback, at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth, Aotearoa, 27 June 2026.
• Environmentality, CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image, Wellington, Aotearoa, 29 June 2026.