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.