Sounding The Future

The future is hard to see from here, but perhaps we can hear it coming.



Sounding the Future is a hybrid audio and reading experience that seeks to listen in to the art of the future. It reconfigures the content from Priest’s interactive installation of the same name into a hypertext adventure that entwines fictional scenarios and factual research. 


Across ten speculative scenarios, presented as both text and creative audio pieces, Priest explores the Future human — the melding of technology and biology resulting in trans- and post-human conditions; and the Future city — the sonic potentials of the new environments we might build around us. Grounding these speculations are Future citings — non-fiction and documentary fragments that weave present practice into this future thinking, including audio interviews with eight of Australia’s most innovative sound and media artists: Guy Ben-Ary, Peter Blamey, Michaela Davies, Robin Fox, Jasmine Guffond, Cat Hope, George Poonkhin Khut, and Pia van Gelder.


As a document of this multi-outcome project, the publication also includes the catalogue for the exhibition Sounding the Future, presented at UTS Gallery, Sydney in 2017, featuring works by Gail Priest (curator), George Poonkhin Khut, Pia van Gelder & Tom Smith and Peter Blamey, with a catalogue essay by Dr Lizzie Muller.