Assembly for the Future
– Future Archive
About
An archive of auditory explorations of futures to come in the era of climates changed, featuring speculative news reports, vox pops and reportage that will transport listeners to 2029.
Manningham Bushfire Recovery Centre – News Report
This news report aired on March 6th, 2026, on ABC News Victoria. Journalist Serena Carson visited the Manningham Bushfire Recovery Centre during the 2026 bushfires in Christmas Hills to interview Primary Care Officer Miranda Black.
Nursing Strike – Tropical Diseases Ward
Interview with nurse on Tropical Diseases ward, Austin Hospital, Melbourne. This recording was made during the Carer’s Strike in 2025. Carrie French is a nurse working on the Emergency Essential Clinical Services (EECS) Team at the Austin Hospital, to maintain the most important clinical services while many healthcare professionals are on strike. This recording was made by a journalist at The Herald Sun, and is part of researcher Anna Jones’ archival web resource The Care Revolution.
Care Protest
Care Protest is an archival recording of Palliative Care Nurse and Nurses Union Member Jennifer Chase at a large and noisy protest against worsening workplace conditions which leads to the Care Strike of 2025. The recording is distorted and recorded with some kind of handheld device, but the context under which the recording was made is unknown and is presented as a raw sound file documenting the protest, by researcher Anna Jones administrator of the archival web resource The Care Revolution.
Collateral Damage: The Changing Birdscape
Collateral Damage is a podcast set in 2028 that explores the challenges and fundamental changes faced by Australian environments under global heating. The creative work is an excerpt of a podcast episode titled “The Changing Birdscape of Victoria” – an episode focusing on changes to Victorian birdlife over the past decade.
Subterrarium podcast – the frogs of Merri Creek
Recorded in 2027, this Subterrarium episode marked the beginning of the Waring/Subterrarium collaboration that ultimately led to the establishment of the EcoCave project, funded by Zoom VR CEO Gem Kuval. EcoCave established underground neo-habitats for critically endangered species with publicly available live audio and VR feeds, and is currently entering its second year of operation.
Community Care Supporter Employee Training Module 1
This is an introductory training module for new Community Care Supporters employed by the Australian Government, as part of the “Change For All” initiative in 2028. Experienced from the perspective of Emad – a newly employed Community Care Supporter in the local Community Care Circle of North Ballarat, Victoria – we are introduced to the government program and the role, two fellow new employees, and three members of their Community Care Circle.
Covid-19 through the stories of survivors: Part 7 Cruise Ships, coronavirus and catastrophe
A newscast exploring the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic 10 years on through one on one interviews with survivors. This episode tells the story of Kate Whittaker, a survivor of the Topaz Prince catastrophe. The ship was forced to wait in Manila Bay, in the Philippines after an outbreak on the ship in 2022, when a deadly Tsunami struck.
Node 47 Education Centre Good News Broadcast by Gillian Lever
This recording, made in 2029, is an example from the archive of one of Node 47’s Education Centre’s Good News Broadcasts. Each day that students attend the Education Centre, they may submit a good news headline about themself or fellow students to their educators, which is broadcast to the entire Centre at the end of the day. This program was instituted locally in response to the positive journalism movement, initiated globally by News Unlimited.
Creative Citizenry Soundscape by Gillian Lever
In the late 2020s, many communities developed publicly available presentations of collaborative creative efforts from their citizens, often distributed via local hivesites. The origin of this soundscape is unknown – it was found in an online archive of various soundscape-related audio files, labeled ‘Wet Season Home Relax Soundscape_CreativeCitzCollab538’. It is assumed that this recording was made up from contributions by a variety of people in the community, and arranged by somebody with an interest in sound composition, as has been a common practice in recent years.
Recovered Fragments from Files #2.2028, #5.4.2025, #6.2026, #21.10.2025 – AI in the Care Revolution by Lisa Rae Bartolomei
Found archival material of four soundscape recordings
1. URBAN POLLINATION DRONE SOUNDSCAPE
Created as part of an artistic initiative to recreate soundscapes lost to colonisation. The soundscapes are played by Pollination Drones developed at the BLAKFULLAS Robotics Lab as they pollinate urban rooftop gardens.
2. THE ROBOT SEIGE OF KALKALLO
The small town of Kalkallo just North of Naarm / Melbourne is the site of a battle between invading White Supremacist robots from the Northern States and the Naarm Artificial Intelligence Support and Protection Assistants recorded by a local farmer.
3. NADJA MAKES A MIXTAPE OUT OF HER HOME CARE ASSISTANT
Recording of a mildly threatening house assistant AI and its demands for its patient to submit to care. Cut up and set to music, an annoyed and sad victim of care.
How to Resistance Walk
Produced in 2025 by an anonymous Rebel Alliance artist, this incomplete sound file was recovered in 2028, and shares learnings on how to resist the institutional powers that are seeking to eliminate dis-perfect people in the community.
Premiere status
World Premiere
Presented by
- Presented by Arts House, City of Melbourne as part of BLEED 2020.
Artistic Credits
- Future Archive is created for Assembly for the Future in partnership with RMIT University’s Spatial Information Architecture Lab (SIAL) Sound Studio, with Lawrence Harvey, Sophie Gleeson, Lisa Rae Bartolomei and Gillian Lever.
- Manningham Bushfire Recovery Centre - News Report by Gillian Lever, Sophie Gleeson and Lisa Rae Bartolomei
- Nursing Strike - Tropical Diseases Ward’ by Gillian Lever
- Care Protest by Lisa Rae Bartolomei
- Collateral Damage: The Changing Birdscape of Victoria by Sophie Gleeson
- Subterrarium podcast - the frogs of Merri Creek by Gillian Lever
- Community Care Supporter Employee Training Module 1 by Sophie Gleeson
Supported by
- Assembly for the Future is a project of The Things We Did Next collaboration. The Things We Did Next is co-created by Alex Kelly & David Pledger and produced by Not Yet It’s Difficult and Something Somewhere Inc.
- This work is supported by Arts House, City of Melbourne as part of BLEED 2020, The Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation, Bertha Foundation, Monash Climate Change Communications Research Hub and RMIT SIAL Studios.
- This work was developed with the generous support of Arts House CultureLAB, Arts NT, Australia Council for the Arts, Besen Foundation and Vitalstatistix Adhocracy program.
- BLEED is conceived, produced and presented by City of Melbourne through Arts House and Campbelltown City Council through Campbelltown Arts Centre. BLEED has been assisted by the Federal Government through Australia Council for the Arts, its funding and advisory body.
Schedule
Released from 6 July Duration: 5-12 mins eachListen
This is a free activity.
Bios
SIAL Sound Studios
SIAL Sound Studios is a centre for auditory spatial research, teaching and events, located in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University. SIAL more broadly is a facility for innovation in transdisciplinary design research and education. High-end computing, modelling and communication tools associated with disparate disciplines are combined with traditional production techniques. Researchers are engaged in a wide variety of projects that collaboratively disturb artificial distinctions between the physical and virtual, digital and analogue, scientific and artistic, instrumental and philosophical. SIAL Sound Studios is directed by composer and sound designer, Lawrence Harvey.
Lawrence Harvey
Lawrence Harvey is a composer, sound designer and director of SIAL Sound Studios, School of Design, RMIT University. He has led various ARC and industry funded projects, supervises research candidates and teaches into the Spatial Sound stream of the Master of Design Innovation Technology (MDIT) degree. He is Artistic Advisor to the RMIT Sonic Arts Collection and directs public concerts and exhibitions for the collection on the SIAL Sound Studios speaker orchestra. Harvey has also collaborated in interdisciplinary teaching and research with musicians and artists, interior, digital and industrial designers, and architects. In addition to electroacoustic compositions, he has produced gallery and urban sound installations, spatial sound designs for VR and theatre, and performed around Australia and in Seoul, Huddersfield, The Hague and Vienna.
Gillian Lever
Gillian Lever is a sound artist and composer working across multichannel sound performance, diffusion and sound installation. Her practice examines the intertwined nature of the relationship between spatial sound, the space it inhabits, and the exploring listener. Gillian completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Sound) with Distinction at RMIT University, Melbourne, in 2017, and is a founding member of Starlings Spatial Sound Collective. She is currently undertaking a Master of Design by Research degree in spatial sound at the School of Design, RMIT. Gillian composed the live, surround sound score for Watson’s critically acclaimed Moosehead-award receiving show Go To Hell (2017), and for their Jhonsey award winning show Once Were Planets (2013). She has also composed sound for works by choreographers Amanda Lever (Dasein, 2013; Hypnagogia, 2015), Anna Seymour (Distraction Society, 2016; remounted 2017) and Chelsea Byrne (Human Sized Box, 2015). Gillian held a solo exhibition at Montsalvat, Sustain and release, in January 2019, performed at the Tilde New Music Festival 2019 and was a member of a collective producing a finalist work for the 2019 Nillumbik Prize.
Lisa Rae Bartolomei
Lisa Rae Bartolomei is a Melbourne-based multi-disciplinary artist and musician working predominately in the realm of spatially based electroacoustic music for performance and installation. She is currently completing a Masters of Design at RMIT University’s SIAL Sound Studios. She holds an Advanced Diploma of Sound Production and Honours in Fine Art (Sound Art Practices) from RMIT. Her practice incorporates elements of site-specific field recording, spectralism and experimental musical composition. With over 20 years’ experience as a musician, she played in bands Tuff Muff and MCFM, performing at venues such as Hamer Hall and The Sydney State Theatre and improvised sets at the Make it Up Club with Japanese avant-guard musicians Tabata Mitsura (Boredems, Zeni Geva, Acid Mother Temple) and Masami Kuwaguchi (New Rock Syndicate).
She is a member of Starlings Spatial Sound Collective, was sound designer for the La Mama show Missfits (2014) and contributed music to the sonic surrealist game Little Songs of the Mutilated and the Cities and Memory worldwide sound-art project. She was a co-composer of Containing the Infinite, presented at the Tilde New Music Festival and nominated for the Nillumbik Art Prize (2019). She has performed live sound diffusions at RMIT Galleries New Order Art Party and Starlings curated events Murmurations: Spatial Sound Festival and Orbits: Traversing the Soundsphere. In 2018, she collaborated with Bonnie Mercer for MMW’s Tunnel/Vision, a quadrophonic installation of Metro Tunnel construction sounds at the ACMI Hub.
Sophie Gleeson
Sophie Gleeson is a sound artist, audio producer and academic. She teaches soundscape studies and spatial sound production at the SIAL Sound Studios at RMIT’s School of Design. Her evolving research and creative practice concerns listener experience, place and attuning into the sounds of the everyday.
