Listening Back is a sounding and listening practice, a Web browser plug-in, and a research into the potential of sound to engage contemporary socio-political contexts, in particular – algorithmic surveillance.

The Listening Back browser add-on sonifies Internet cookies in real-time and has been enacted across live performance, installation, and personal computer usage. By providing situations to listen back to cookie data within the real-time dynamics of Web browsing, the affective, embodying, time-based, omni-directional and experiential affordances of sound are engaged, not primarily as an object of study but as a means of creative inquiry. This sounding strategy for interrupting the visual surface of the browser interface to expose back-end data capture addresses a contemporary situation where panoptic modes of surveillance, reliant on the human sensory modality of vision and a visual representation of the surveillance apparatus, have been largely superseded by non-sensory, post-aesthetic, extractive capacities of algorithmic surveillance. Intangible, automated data capture infrastructures thereby evade human semantic interpretation and scrutiny. Sound as an aesthetic device that registers both conceptually and experientially, is engaged to reinstate sense-making into the online surveillance context and this talk will share artistic outcomes that explore what it means to engage sound to think through and experience contemporary data politics.

Jasmine Guffond is an artist and composer working at the interface of social, political and technical infrastructures. Focused on electronic composition across music and art contexts her practice spans live performance, recording, installation and custom made browser add-on. Through the sonification of data she addresses the potential of sound to engage with contemporary political questions and engages listening as a situated knowledge practice. Jasmine completed her PhD at the University of New South Wales Art, Design & Architecture department in 2021 where she conducted practice-based research into sound and listening as a critical modes of inquiry into online surveillance cultures.

Jasmine has exhibited internationally including composing sound for Shulea Cheang’s installation at the Taiwanese Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2019, and collaborating with Zorka Wollny on a sound installation for the Chicago Architecture Biennal, 2019.  She completed her Sound Studies masters at the University der Künste in 2015, received the ‘Working Grant for New Music und Sound Art’ from the Berlin Senate in 2016 and was featured in Wire magazine in 2019. She has performed live internationally at electronic music and art festivals including opening for CTM festival in 2020 and has released solo records to critical acclaim with the Sonic Pieces (2015, 2017), Karl Records (2018) and Editions Mego (2020) labels.

http://jasmineguffond.com/