YOUR IMMORAL ARTIFICIAL EAR

A physical ‘album’, artist-made electronic object and portable listening device by Zhuyang Liu.

‘What you own is not the sound inside this album, but the possibility of giving a sound somewhere to remain.’​

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Your Immoral Artificial Ear began with a simple question:

What if an album were not something placed inside a machine, but the machine itself?

Recorded music has long been carried by physical media — records, tapes and CDs. Their physical forms have changed, but the relationship has largely remained the same: an artist produces a body of sound, and the listener receives it.

Your Immoral Artificial Ear proposes a different relationship.

Here, the album is not a container for the artist’s recordings. The album is the electronic object itself — a structure for storing, carrying, receiving and playing sound.

It uses technologies already embedded in contemporary everyday devices: digital memory, electronic playback and Bluetooth transmission.

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‘What changes is not the technology itself, but what these functions are allowed to mean when they become part of an album.’

When the ear reaches its owner, there is nothing inside. not a prerecorded album, without fixed soundtrack, no archive of the artist’s memories.

'There is nothing in your ear now.

Please upload.'

To acquire the album is therefore not simply to receive access to the artist’s sound. It is to acquire access to the album itself: the ability to decide what enters it, what remains, what disappears, and what is played through it.

The first sound inside the ear does not have to be music.

It may be someone’s voice.

A field recording.

A message.

A goodbye.

“I miss you.”

The sound of somewhere you may never return to.

Or silence.

The work begins when the first memory is placed inside the ear.

This reflects an ordinary condition of contemporary life. Voices arrive as messages. Moments become audio files. Music, conversations and places are recorded, streamed, copied, deleted, transferred and carried between electronic devices.

Sound has become both intimate and immaterial — translated into data, moving continuously between people and machines.

Your Immoral Artificial Ear gives this condition a physical form.

Through local storage, the ear can accumulate an archive over time. Through Bluetooth, it can also receive and play sound without permanently storing it. It can therefore operate both as a place where sound is kept and as a temporary point through which sound passes.

From the moment its owner begins to use it, each ear develops a different relationship with sound. Its contents can be added, removed and replaced. Its function changes with the person using it.

Its physical body can change too. The transparent shell allows photographs, drawings, notes, materials and found objects to be placed around the electronics, allowing each ear to acquire a visual history alongside its sonic one.

The album is no longer a finished body of sound authored by one person and distributed to many listeners. Instead, the artist produces its physical and electronic structure, while its owner gains agency over its contents and use.

Part album, part listening device and part artist-made object, Your Immoral Artificial Ear uses the familiar language of contemporary electronics to imagine another relationship between sound, memory, authorship and ownership.

The artist builds the ear.

The owner decides what it remembers — and what passes through it.