Joel Stern

Dr Joel Stern is a Vice Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.

Joel Stern is a researcher, curator, and artist living in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Informed by a background in experimental music and sonic art, Stern’s work focuses on how practices of sound and listening inform and shape our contemporary worlds.

In 2020, with fellow artist-researchers Sean Dockray and James Parker, Joel founded Machine Listening, a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation, focused on the political and aesthetic dimensions of the computation of sound and speech.

The collective works across diverse media and modes of production. In addition to research, writing, and artworks, Machine Listening have produced an expanded curriculum, conceived as an experiment in collective learning and community formation; an online library and interview series; numerous on-and-offline events, lectures, performances; and, a browser-based instrument for composing with audio and video via text.

Machine Listening emerged out of Stern’s previous work, with James Parker, on Eavesdropping, a multifaceted project staged at Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, and City Gallery, Wellington, addressing the capture and control of our sonic worlds, alongside strategies of resistance. Eavesdropping comprised a touring exhibition, public programs, reading groups and publication, made in collaboration with artists, researchers, writers, and activists from Australia and around the world. This project also formed the basis of Stern’s PhD thesis ‘Eavesdropping: The Politics, Ethics, and Art of Listening’ in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, completed in 2020.

In 2024, with Sean Dockray, Stern curated This Hideous Replica, a major exhibition, public program and talks series featuring Australian and international artists critically exploring themes of reproduction, duplication, mutation, doubling, copying and cloning, in the context of contemporary emerging technologies and their social and political impacts.  

Between 2013 and 2022 Stern was Artistic Director of pioneering Australian organisation Liquid Architecture, helping establish it as one of the worlds leading forums for sonic art. In this capacity he curated and produced numerous festivals, exhibitions, concerts and publications in Australia and internationally, while developing artistic research investigations including disorganising, Polyphonic Social, Why Listen?, Instrument Builders Project, and Ritual Community Music. 

Artworks/Performances (selection)

• MESS commissioned artist, Melbourne Recital Centre, 2024
• Machine Listening Songbook 5-x, Soft Centre festival, State Library of Victoria, 2024
• Machine Listening Songbook, Unsound Festival, 2023
• Environments 12, RMIT Design Hub, 2023
• After Words, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2022
• Music and sound art performances in Australia, Europe, Asia and North America, solo and with various collaborators since 2000. 

Curatorial (selection)

• This Hideous Replica, RMIT Gallery/First Site/Now or Never Festival, 2024
• Art+Race+AI, Victorian College of Art / Art+Australia, 202
• Data Relations Summer School, ACCA and RMIT, 202
• Liquid Architecture x Light, ACMI, Melbourne, 2022
• AUDITION series, Composite and various venues, Melbourne, 2022
• Logical Conclusions/Automation Effects, ADM+S Symposium, Miscenllania, 2022
• Tomoko Momiyama, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart, 2022
• Jenny Hickinbotham: Songs so Far, Blindside Gallery, Melbourne, 2022
• Machine Listening: Unnatural Language Processing, Unsound Festival, Krakow, 2022
• Disorganising, Collingwood Yards, Melbourne, 2021
• Machine Listening: Improvisation and Control, NTU CCA Singapore, 2021
• Unheard Relations, McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery, Langwarrin, 2021
• Instrument Builders Project 5, MONA FOMA, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, 2021
• Machine Listening: Against the Coming World, Unsound Festival, Krakow, 2020
• Unsettling Scores: Sovereignty, Resistance, Futurity Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2020
• Polyphonic Social Festival, Abbotsford Convent, 2016-2019
• Eavesdropping, City Gallery, Wellington, 2019
• Ventriloquy, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2019
• Eavesdropping,  Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne 2018Acoustic Justice, Federal Court of Australia, Melbourne, 2018
• Instrument Builders Project 4, Kyoto Art Centre, Kyoto, 2018
• OtherFilm Festival, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2006-2012
  
  Industry
  
  
• Liquid Architecture, Artistic Director / CEO, 2013
• City of Yarra, Yarra Arts Community Engagement Facilitator, 2021
• Instrument Builders Project, founding co-Director, 2012-
• OtherFilm, founding co-Director, 2004-2012
• Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Associate, Melbourne Law School
• Sound Art and Auditory Cultures Lab, Associate, RMIT
• Australia Council for the Arts, Peer Assessor, 2021-24
• Australia Council for the Arts, International Engagement Assessor, 2021
• Music Victoria Awards, Assessor, 2017, 2021
• Asialink, Performing Arts Assessment Panel, 2010-2013
• Melbourne International Film Festival, Assessment Panel, 2010-2012