Liquid Architecture

Design: Karis Sim

In June and July 2010, celebrating its eleventh consecutive year, the Liquid Architecture sound festival runs for four weeks and goes to seven cities across Australia, presenting an exciting program of contemporary sound arts. The diverse program features live events and installations showcasing the highest quality sound work in an intense focused listening environment, privileging our most unsung sense: listening.

Liquid Architecture presents sound. Sound as the starting point for the active practice of listening. This is not to deny the conceptual or the abstract, the metaphorical or the representational, the expressionistic or the meaningful. But rather this is to restore the emphasis on the primary act of listening. Liquid Architecture is in effect then a listening festival and the artists presented are selected as much for their ability to listen with sensitive ears as for the sound they produce. You are invited to engage your sensitive ears and listen.

A key objective is the promotion of artists practising on the periphery of music and sound culture, particularly those with an experimental aesthetic and a critical approach to (media) cultures. The artistic content of the festival focuses upon and privileges sound practice in all its manifestations but, due to the cross disciplinary potential of sound, many other art practices are included in the festival. Liquid Architecture focuses on any and all art forms involving particular emphasis on the auditory, including an exciting mix of musical performance, AV presentations and installation work, along with a strong critical element involving panels, workshops and artist talks.

With more than a decade of experience to draw upon, Liquid Architecture combines the fragmented communities in which sound art practices occur, achieving cross disciplinary appreciation and critique. The practical objective of this strategy is to popularise and publicise sound culture through greater aggregate audience size and a higher profile, and to make sound culture more accessible to the community, particularly to youth and student audiences. Audiences currently include those engaged with contemporary creative practice, sound arts practitioners, music industry professionals, electronic music concert goers, academics, cultural theorists and students (post & undergraduate), youth audiences and enthusiasts of adventurous popular music.

Liquid Architecture popularises sound culture, particularly with young/emerging content producers within Australia's active student culture, in order to build not only future audiences but also future artists. Our rationale reflects an intense engagement with specialist and broader cultures, and the desire to make a contribution to those cultures. Sound practice is often cross disciplinary and Liquid Architecture reflects that, not only in the work presented but in the broad range of audiences it attracts.

The opportunities to network with national and international artists are an important means of generating future initiatives and cross cultural collaborations. The community is being exposed to some of the most exciting explorations occurring within sound culture that also happen to intersect with the media and fine arts. The exposure generated by Liquid Architecture is crucial in developing new audiences for the many discreet sound and experimental music communities currently operating around the country, and internationally.

"For many, it refers to sound-based art work (or at least art work where the principal focus is on sound) across the broad gamut of performance, installation and broadcast contexts, which departs from both traditional musical instrumentation and notational methods and frequently employs electronic media. Others may see it as an intersecting space with roots in post-Cageian music practice, or indeed 'post-phonographic' music practice, and installation art."

Julian Knowles, QUT Portfolio Director and President of QMusic, in an article entitled Sound Practice, Sound Thesis in RealTime No. 68, August / September 2005.