Eavesdropping: The Politics, Ethics, and Art of Listening

Background: The earliest references to eavesdropping are in law. According to William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769), ‘eavesdroppers, or such as listen under walls or windows, or the eaves of a house, to hearken after discourse, and thereupon to frame slanderous and mischievous tales, are a common nuisance and presentable at the court-leet’. Today eavesdropping is not only legal, but ubiquitous. What was once a minor offence has become a key political and legal problem of our time, as the Snowden revelations made clear. Contribution: ‘Eavesdropping’ was a curatorial research project incorporating: An exhibition at Ian Potter Museum of Contemporary Art and City Gallery, Wellington, featuring 12 works by artists, activists, and detainees, with audiences of 60,000. A book, Eavesdropping: A Reader, published by Melbourne Law School and City Gallery, featuring 8 new essays. 32 public lectures and performances in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Wellington. An archive and website with 200,000 visits, comprising writing, documentation, and media coverage. Significance: The research redresses important gaps. While Peter Szendy’s All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage (2016) proposes a philosophy of listening connected with the figure of the spy, a theory of eavesdropping engaging politics, ethics, law, and art remains necessary. While several curated surveys have thematized surveillance culture (Rhetorics of Surveillance at ZKM, Karlsruhe 2001), none have focused on the capture of our sonic worlds, belying the ocularcentrism of much contemporary art. And, while recent surveys of sonic art have been presented around the world (Soundings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2013), most have been principally concerned with the production of sound; none have so explicitly held the act of listening to questions of politics and law.