User:Angeliki/Grad-Abstracts & Synopsis

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Presence/tracing and public space

Karen O`rourke. Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers (2013)

This book is related to my research because it is a detailed documentation on projects related to locative media, public space and walking embedded by sound, text and other media. Thus it can give me an insight of this intersection of art and media the last decades. It connects with other more theoretical texts of my research.

Abstract

The book is an approach to make a differentiated map. It is a collection of artistic practices focusing on walking. The writer combines these examples of works that he personally experienced zooming in and out the concept of walking and mapping as an artistic practice since 70s. These approaches are blurring the borders between the fields of art and others.
In the first chapter he starts by describing a contemporary walking project and then generalize the process by referring to the terms psychogeography and drifting, as explained by Debord. He describes then more walking projects till the time of 90s in which artists, and not only, are using algorithms, GPS, low-tech media technologies, political strategies, their own bodies and most importantly are interacting with the public. By walking and giving scores and instructions to themselves they reveal hidden narratives, re-claim the streets with the motivation of understanding their surroundings. Some awkwardness and playfulness characterizes these projects, that reveals the city’s underlying structure and re-appropriates the language.
In the second chapter the author emphasizes the process of walking as a fundamental biological action. She refers to examples of artists who experimented with the practice of walking as a ‘mechanic of everyday movement’. Gradually artists moved to the listening of everyday outside sounds. After this historical recall the author comes back to the present by describing her personal experience as a participant to an augmented walking created by Janet Cardiff. O’ Rourke analyses the project and relates it to art works from the past like surrealist novels and land art. According to her, these artistic experiences, in contrast to past binaural sound works, trigger the audience to move through the space while listening. She concludes that walking as an art practice may resemble to architectural practices.

Synopsis
2nd chapter:

In this chapter the author emphasizes the process of walking as a fundamental biological action that depends on the body networks as an attempt for balancing with surroundings. She refers to examples of artists and especially dancers who experimented with the practice of walking as a ‘mechanic of everyday movement’. Artists like Yvonne Rainer tended to perceive body and movement as abstract terms disconnected from their context and were exploring their mechanism by creating scores for movement. He refers then to the involvement of repetition in that process that was intensively used by many different fields in 60s. The repetitive walking explored by dancers was opening up the space and time of action. The studio was becoming a space for an eternal repetitive movement. Such activities expanded in the realm of theatre with Beckett creating a piece were actors were moving repetitively following the same pattern on stage. Gradually the author moves in the next step of these attempts which was the involvement of everyday outside sounds. The art was blending with life. After that artists started to explore movement while listening sounds outside. “(R)eceptivity is not passivity”(O’ Rourke, pg. 34) as Dewey said for the audience who was just walking and listening its surrounding. After this historical recall the author comes back to present by describing her personal experience as a participant to the project Her Long Black Hair of Janet Cardiff. The project is about an augmented walking in the streets of New York. Cardiff created an audio consisted of her spoken words while walking a path, describing events from the past, history, fiction and mythology, sound samples from the spot and music. Together with the headphones and sound device also photos of past events were given to the participants. O’ Rourke analyses the project and relates it to similar narratives created by surrealists in the past where the images, as the sounds for Cardiff, “replace verbal desrciptions” (O’ Rourke, pg. 43). She talks about the dialectical landscape and the relation of her art with land art of Robert Smithson: the multiple layers of narratives reveal the “endless maze of relations and interconnections” of the landscape. According to her even though these artistic experiences resemble binaural sound and Théâtrophone from the past, they have a big difference: the audience doesn’t stay still listening the piece.

She concludes that walking, perceived as an art form first by Richard Long, “may be a form of architecture” as “we shape space as we go”(O’ Rourke, pg. 43). She gives an example of the project Here While We Walk in which a group of participants were walking silently inside an elastic band forming a mobile architecture of individuals focusing on perceiving themselves being in the present.

My opinion is that these contemporary examples of psychogeography keep a continuous line with the attention on insignificant and daily events as artistic process, on the base of the concept of Michel de Charteau in The Practice of Everyday Life. On the other hand I am wondering what these abstract entities and events represent today as they are related to a mental perception developed by the Western art spheres. Their indirect connection with political, cultural and social connotations provoke interestingly different perspectives of the surrounding and our bodies. But how this can be translated in our multicultural and multilayered environments?

Radio art and public sphere

Sarah Kanouse. Take It to the Air: Radio as Public Art (2011)

This text talks specifically about artists using the radio as a radical tool to raise questions on public spheres. It provides technical and conceptual details of the projects. It highlights the urgency to learn the radio technology and spectrum in this era of control even though it is believed to be an old, inactive medium. This argument can strengthen my statement and involvement with the radio medium.

Abstract
The text introduces radio as an active medium of public art. Since 1920 the radio was criticized as a wasteland of commercials and state propaganda that separated the practitioners from the public. Tight regulations restricted the electromagnetic public sphere and artists didn’t engage deeply believing that it was an unrealized social space. Only pirate radio practitioners could interrogate the public, critical and political aspects of radio that public art aims to. Kanouse describes three projects that use radio and provoke a direct engagement of public bodies in space. They all transmit to the physical and electromagnetic public spaces on a way that forces a confrontation with the rules of both.

Synopsis
The text introduces radio as an active medium of public art. Since 1920 the radio was criticized as a wasteland of commercials and state propaganda. It was Bertolt Brecht that perceived it as transceiver to experiment with and questioning its use and Walter Benjamin who noticed that it will be a failure as long as the separation between practitioners and public dominates it. From early on, tight regulations restricted the electromagnetic public sphere so that artists didn’t engage deeply with its elements and it was constantly seen as “an unrealized and undertheorized social and aesthetic space” (Kanouse, pg. 87). Only pirate radio practiotioners, with their low-tech practice and self-broadcasting, could interrogate the public, critical and political aspects of radio, as Brecht and Benjamin would imagine.

But what is public art? According to Kanouse public art exists outside of galleries and museums, addressing a theoretical body of criticism on “publicness” to different groups of people, rather than searching for institutional funding and unified audiences. Rosalyn Deutsche mentions that public art differs from state sponsored art and constitutes a public through dialogue that leads to political action. This practice takes account the inevitable exclusions, conflicts, divisions and instability that may have and thus it can become a democratic sphere. Returning back to radio, Kanouse refers to the state regulations imposed on radio and specifically on FRC (Federal Radio Comission) in United States that restricted access to airwaves and permitted licensed transmissions only in low frequencies, so there will be no interferences with commercial frequencies. That had as a result the creation of a “public body” in the name of a homogenous public and the radio’s monopolization by mainstream entertainment and political commentary. The author sees the use of prohibited technologies and the confrontation with these restrictions as a political act. An act that can propose an “anti-authoritarian radical democracy” (Kanouse, pg. 89) through the formation of small groups that learn to broadcast and produce alternate media cultures. An unlicensed broadcast can challenge what public art wants to: the creation of a public sphere willing to interrogate the “democratical” public space which is part of.

After introducing public art and radio as possible extension of it, Kanouse describes three projects that exist within this realm. The first project, called Talking Homes by John Brumit, was realized under the residency of Neighborhood Public Radio (little NPR) arts collective of Detroit. The author describes two iterations, part of this project, that broadcasted personal stories of inhabitants through transmitters located in their houses and other buildings, revealing the struggle and the daily routine of these people living in degraded neighbourhoods. The interviewers were trained by the artist to use their transmitters. It seemed that the exposition of the private sphere, reflected in the localization of the media and the gossiping produced, to the public reframed clearer the struggle for the neighborhood than the big radio programmes. The engagement of the public, which was not the privileged audience of art spaces, was deep because of the use of a certified from FCC technology and it didn’t care for the more technical context about radios and frequencies. Both iterations followed the spirit of NPR characterized by the smallness, site-specificity and listener’s participation. Even though these small transmitters have not many listeners because of the smalll range, NRC sees that as a way to link people and thus negates the separation of practitioner and public mentioned before. The little NPR, in contrast to National Public Radio (big NPR), embraces amateurism on the base of “polymorphous”. In other words it embraces the instability, diversity, discomforts and the contradictions that produces.

The second project is The Public Broadcast Cart made by Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga, that is a portable home-made radio broadcasting the voice of the one driving the cart in several places. The voice of the participant becomes public on site through speakers and extends to radio frequencies and the internet. The legality of the radio cart doesn’t concern the present public and the unusual object attracts even more their attention. A manual on how to make this object is published in its website, and this detailed explanation of the technology, even more than the other project, demystifies the technology. Based on the open source and pirate radio spirit, this offering of access to the technology refuses the specialization and the prohibition of the airwaves. The parallel expanses of the voice and the uncensored speech in three different public spaces occupies at the same time the physical, online and electromagnetic realm. The DIY electronic media empowers the individual and collective voice. The last project is called Radio Ballet made by the group LIGNA and is about a group-listening performance in public. The participants interrupted the urban flow by violating the social norms in public space. More specifically they were listening with headphones to movement instructions and commentaries on public behaviours broadcasted in a radio frequency. Their engagement with the environment questioned the “monotonous, functionalist and consumerist spatial code”. LIGNA’s “proliferation of identical voices in multiple places”(Kanouse, pg. 97) revealed and exploited the uncanny elements of the radio.

Kanouse concludes that although radio, in developed countries, is perceived as an old “dead”, monopolized medium, its low technology and the decreasing commercial interest in that, made it a critical tool for artists. Its materiality and restrictions of physicality turns it into a link between the “lived and the imagined” (Kanouse, pg. 97). Radio’s dispersion, or one voice in many places, even though it is subject to regulations, is open for contesting its public sphere. In all the projects she refers to, there is a direct engagement of public bodies in space. The transmission to the physical and electromagnetic public spaces forces a confrontation with the rules of both. At the end, she encourages to use radio as a tool of intervention in the diverse public spaces.

Having a small knowledge on radio medium I was also perceiving radio as an old medium, but it is inevitable to avoid its presence in public spaces and realms, especially in countries that have not access in the main communication platforms. It is my question though what makes it so special in relation to other more contemporary mediums like Internet. Is it its specificity on material or the assimilation of a medium in a society after many years of its existence that makes it a critical tool? Regarding the amount of regulations imposed on it it seems to be a powerful tool for contesting the public bodies created by the state on the name of “public good”. I am wondering if this DIY culture becomes self-referential when produces projects in the shake of technology. I believe that sometimes the less technical context is enough for declaring the statement the artist wants to make, like on the case of the first project. In other words only the curated exposition of the medium and its content in the space can provoke many thoughts on that matter.


Christina Dunbar-Hester. The tools of gender production (2014)

The text is informative on the inside of a geek radio group and is related to my motivation. The exclusion of the female voice in the public spheres of the communication technologies is related to the access to the technical knowledge. How gaining and performing this knowledge can happen by avoiding gender and social structures and propose other uses and poetical aspects of the technology that overpass the masculine mastery in a collective process.

Abstract
The text elaborates on the relation of the geek selfhood and gender as experienced in the barnraising of a radio station by an activist collective called Prometheus. The author presents the experiences of volunteers and core members of the barnraising. She observed conflicts because of the novice and expert inequality, gender structures and the level of pedagogy and technical familiarity. Radio activists were concerned about these issues and tried to consciously reinvent their associations. The author concludes that even though radio activists focused on the community scale of production the stereotypes of novices and experts and the gendered social structures were intervening in the process. According to her the geek selfhood can challenge the gender binary and the whiteness in the electronics culture and can be reconstructed.


Synopsis
The text elaborates on the relation of the geek selfhood and gender as experienced in the barnraising of a radio station by an activist collective called Prometheus. The author presents the experiences of volunteers and core members of the barnraising. She observed conflicts because of the novice and expert inequality, gender structures and the level of pedagogy and technical familiarity. Radio activists were concerned about these issues and tried to consciously reinvent their associations. Masculinity is highly associated with technical skills and radio culture. The social structures and personal background affect the familiarity with radio hardware between different genders. In the early twentieth century, according to Susan Douglas (Dunbar-Hester, 2014, pg. 54-55), there is a shift of masculinity from a physically powerful to technically powerful. The first attempt of the activists was to uproot the associations of certain skills with one gender. It is a continuous problem for the sessions of Geep Group that women wouldn’t stay longer. Most of the times the experts were men and the novice women and the identity and appearance was affecting the approach of the participants to them. The women with less knowledge were discouraged to ask many questions in the sessions and expose their ignorance. A kind of insidious quietness was imposed above ‘loud’ newcomer women together with a “quietly competitive dynamic forged by the men in the group” (Dunbar-Hester, 2014, pg. 56). For Ellen, an attendant of Geek Group, was more comfortable and enjoyable to learn how to build transmitters and cantennas in her private sphere with friends and family than in the group. The technical culture by the men of the group didn’t let them erase their masculinity and competitiveness. Rose, that was more involved in the radio culture, wanted to create a women based radio station and observed that the men involved were keeping their expertise for themselves and didn’t share their knowledge. She felt empowered when she gained the technical knowledge of radio. Her action was “a self-conscious gender-boundary crossing” (Dunbar-Hester, 2014, pg. 57). For Prometheus it was difficult to find the people with technical skills and the radical vision of the group to teach in the barnraisings. People that would not follow the engineering culture of exclusion. One strategy was to decouple electronics from the white masculinity. Women and people of color whose identities were not traditionally linked to this field were more critical teachers. In barnraisings the gender division was present in the labor that had to be done. So the technical work was done my men and all the rest, logistics, organizational tasks and cooking by women. That had as a result the skill level of a woman on technology to affect her visibility in the group more than normal. Even though theoretically the gender-boundary crossing is feasible, in practice in the chaos of barnraising the domestic roles of each gender arised and the one was excluding the other. The masculine attitudes of technical mastery were also performed by women to newcomers. Radio activists were avoiding hetero-normative speech and included queer culture in their groups. Women who were willing to present their technical or geek identity were already reinventing their femininity and identity.

The author concludes that even though radio activists focused on the community scale of production the stereotypes of novices and experts and the gendered social structures were intervening in the process. The participants even though ‘outsiders’ of the mainstream were not necessarily rejecting the traditional norms. The power of the domestic gender roles is very appealing. She observed that the activists should have focused also in the non-technical labor in barnraisings and not taking it for granted. This could help in the gender-neutral tasks they wanted to accomplish. The geek identity is characterized by the white male that even though is outside of the mainstream it is exclusive. The ‘other’ (women and color) were improvising and were more innovative in order to gain access in the technical knowledge. On the other hand many women in the barnraising believed that being geek is incompatible to their femininity, so they were preferred to do more ‘women’ work like knitting. The women doing that the other were seen as ‘traitors’. Overall the geek selfhood can challenge the gender binary and the whiteness in the electronics culture and can be reconstructed.

It is noticeable how the gender binary present in the geek cultures is associated with the private and public space division. Women would feel more comfortable to learn about building electronics at home than in public sessions of groups that are supposed to do that. The quiet competitive sphere also of male geeks is characteristic of any public domain were the male voice is more dominant. The attitude of the expert created discomfort and exclusion to the novice that were mostly people of color and women. This imposed a kind of quietness to the newcomers who are discouraged to ask questions and they seem to be loud for the group.

Tetsuo Kogawa. Radio in the Chiasme (2008)

Abstract

  • Joseph-Hunter, G., 2009. Transmission Arts: The Air That Surrounds Us. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 31, 34–40. ===
  • Sarah Kanouse. Tactical Irrelevance: Art and Politics at Play (2007) ===
  • Dunbar-Hester, C., 2014. Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  • Gilbert Simondon, 2012. ON TECHNO-AESTHETICS. PARRHESIA 14, 1–8.
  • Kahn, D., Whitehead, G. (Eds.), 1994. Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, First Paperback Edition edition. ed. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
  • Kamal, S., 2007. Development On-Air: Women’s Radio Production in Afghanistan. Gender and Development 15, 399–411.
  • Max, N., n.d. The BROADCAST WORKS and AUDIUM.
  • Milutis, J., 2006. Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything, 1 edition. ed. Univ Of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
  • Naughton, T., 1996. Community Radio: A Voice for the Voiceless. Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 12–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/4066258
  • Strauss, N., Mandl, D. (Eds.), 1994. Radio Text(e). Semiotext, New York, NY, USA.
  • van der Heide, E., 2013. Radioscape: Into Electromagnetic Space. Leonardo Music Journal 23, 15–16. https://doi.org/10.1162/LMJ_a_00143
  • Weiss, A.S., 1995. Phantasmic Radio. Duke University Press Books, Durham, N.C.
  • DIY-DITO-DIWO and so on. (no date). Available at: http://www.constantvzw.org/verlag/spip.php?article135 (Accessed: 1 November 2018).
  • Wigley, M. (2015) Buckminster Fuller Inc: architecture in the age of radio. Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers.

Voice/speech and public space

Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy (1982)

This book was part of my research the last year and supports my motivation for doing this research. The approach of Ong to relate methods of oral cultures with the writing cultures informs my concept and provides me with arguments on relating voices and speech with text and public presence.

Abstract
The selection of the parts of this book aims to highlight the importance of the methods of orality in the development of the human consciousness and culture. The dynamic of orality and literacy will favor a deeper understanding of human communication. The former is the primary and natural condition of the latter, which is developed as technology in the high- technological societies. But their relation doesn't mean that are dependent on each other. Oral cultures exist without the need of writing, texts and dictionaries. Ong describes in detail what are those methods with which oral people can organize complex thoughts. His aim is to provide a connection between the two cultures for the shake of the human awareness.

Rose Gibbs, Speech Matters: Violence and the Feminist Voice (2016)

Abstract
This article talks about the importance of voice and speech-making in feminist actions.The feminists were embracing the body and the personal story of an individual through the privitization of the voice and speech that also unites a group of people.

Synopsis
This article talks about the importance of voice and speech-making in feminist actions. According to Hanna Arendt the speech is possible in a group of people and it is a civilized way to respond to violence. The speeches of African American women were the most intense as they were tolerating a lot of violence from police. The right for women to speak in public was not there at that moment. The brave speech of Sojourner Truth was one of the first speech acts of women in public. Similar situation was for the BAME women in Britain were the violence was coming from inside their houses. And only till recently this action was criminalized. The philosophical western thought, based on the ancient Greek philosophers, supports the division between private and public sphere. In the public sphere everybody should be human but the inside of private domains is ruled by a domestic power where violence is permitted. This has reached to the point were in the public spaces men are the operators of politics. Suffragettes were doing speech- making workshops for women, providing them with tools “with which to take their concerns out into the public domain”. In 60s and 70s consciousness-raising sessions were inviting women to talk from their personal perspective and allowing everybody to speak by prioritizing listening to each other. In contrast to mainstream political spheres the feminists like anarchists were looking for horizontal ways of communication were no voice was dominating over others. They focused on the voice because there is a uniqueness in it that embodies the speaker and doesn’t follow the abstract and bodiless universality of western thought. Even more the voice through speech (songs, protest) connects one another in a group and at the same time keeps the uniqueness of the speaker, as no one can represent anyone according.

I believe that this article makes clear why there is this urgent use of voice and speech as important mediums of presence and resistance till today were our speeches are mostly mediated and social media have replaced our communication spaces. It is interesting how feminists were working with workshops as they prioritized the physical presence of women and the understanding of how to resist through physical actions (speech making). I can see connections with the Speaker's Corner and occcupy movements were any individual would speak to a group of people with concern to the others. There the voice played an important role in the spreading of the speech to the farest points of the public space, as sound devices that amplified the voice were not permitted. Thus the audience would repeat every sentence of the speaker.

Anne Carson, The Gender of Sound (2016)

Abstract
The text talks about the association of the quality of the voice with the use of it under the aspect of the gender. A notion that is rooted in ancient Greece and it is still valid. She says that it is commonly believed that women produce different sounds than men. They are related to the high-pitched voice, which is connected with bestiality and disorder. Patriarchal culture have developed the tactic of ‘sophrosyne’, self-control for the voice, through speech which defines the human nature. Carson concludes that maybe we can find another human essence than repression and the idea of the self.

Synopsis
People are judged by the sounds they are making. Aristotle defines as brave creatures the ones that have deep voice and evil the ones that have high-pitched voice. The first voice is the right one to use in public assemblies. The ancients were associating, falsely according to the writer, the quality of the voice with the use of it under the aspect of the gender. The masculine deep voice indicates self- control and the voice of all the others (women, androgyny, e.t.c.) is related to talkativeness and makes men feel uncomfortable. Aristotle believed that the vocal sound is based on the physiognomy, the genitals, of a person and so men speak more heavily. So the doctors would suggest exercises of oration to men to cure the damage of the daily use of loud and high-pitched voice. Even today the women in public life worry if their voice is too light or hight to deserve respect. Thus radio producers and politicians, like Margaret Thatcher, are trained to learn how to speak in public, deepen their voice and being taken seriously. Carson (1996, pg. 120) observes that the female voice in public is related to madness, witchery, bestiality, disorder and chaos. This association justifies the tactic of patriarchal culture to ‘put a door’ on the female mouth since those times. Gerdrude Stein, for example, was judged for her big physical size and her monstrous voice that could not be tolerated by the male writers like Ernest Hemingway. Carson emphasizes the fact that he was expatriate and that is why he had feelings of alienation and was afraid of the ‘other’. Similarly Alkaios, an archaic poet that had been expelled, was left outside of the public assembly and was disgust by the women’s voices talking nonsense. In the ancient world women were excluded in the margin, the dark and formless space. With this perception Ancient Greek thinkers had set the gender binary. The radical otherness of the female was perceived by men as an utterance of female sounds bad to hear. This utterance, a high-pitched cry, is called ‘ololyga’ and it is a ritual practice of women sometimes in important daily moments like the birth of a child. ‘Ololyga’ were considered as a pollution to the civic spaces, where men were practicing politics, and thus were limited in the outskirts of the city. Alkaios was feeling political naked in front of the shrieking of women. This disorderly loud female noise was related to a non civilized wild space. The writer tells us that patriarchical thinking on emotional and ethical matters is related to ‘sophrosyne’, self- control of the body. The female version of this term was perceived more as a way for men to silence women when they get loud or scream of pain or pleasure. A man is feminized when he leaves his emotions come out of his mouth and so he has to control himself. Silencing of women, the female ‘sophrosyne’, had been an object of legislative arrangements in the ancient world. Women didn’t have the license to express their ‘noise’ in specific places and events and there was a also a restriction over the duration, the content and the choreography of their rituals in funerals so that they wouldn’t create chaos and craziness. So, women’s public utterance restricted in cultural institutions expressing nothing more than a self- fulfilled prophecy. The human nature, as defined by the patriarchy, is differ from the others on the ability on articulating the sound and creating the ‘logos’, speech. Canson brings the example of Graham Bell, who wouldn’t let his deaf wife learn sign language. He believed that words should be less mediated and only through speech and its control the rational message will pass on. Freud was sharing the same ideas about ‘hysteria’, which was reflecting the “direct translation into somatic terms of psychic events within the woman’s body” (Carson, 1996, pg. 129). He would cure it only by re-channeling these signs through rational speech. Ancient culture constructed the ‘otherness’ of the female based on the idea that women transfer the inside, that is supposed to remain hidden, into the outside. They believed that the speech of the woman, as her body, is not a public property/data and should not be expressed in public. This direct continuity of the inside of a woman to the outside would expose her sexual experiences and this was repelling for men. Thus the masculine act of ‘sophrosyne’, or otherwise self censorship, was the solution to that problem. Plutarch talks about the connection between the verbal and sexual characteristics of a person that separates men from women. In the ancient medical and anatomical theory women had two mouths, the upper and the lower, connected through a neck. The lips of both of them guarded the “hollow cavity” (Carson, 1996, pg. 131) and they should remain closed. In their rituals women were also talking ugly and bad things. These unpleasant tendencies of them had to stay hidden from the men’s view. But in Dionysian festivals the task of one selected woman would be to discharge the unspeakable things on behalf of the city, that was called ‘aischrologia’ leading to ‘katharsis’. The diagnosis of Carson is that when the idea of bad sound of the female voice and the expression of its unspeakable words are mixed together then this confuses the questions on the distinction between the essence and the construction of the human nature. Even today there is a sex difference in language that is based on these blurry notions between the use and the quality of sound. Women are making different sounds than men. ‘Aischrologia’ seems similar to the therapeutic practice of hypnosis by Freud on hysterical women. Their emotions, the unspeakable things, were polluting their inside and ‘talking cure’ or otherwise ‘katharsis’ would help them. Female is associated with the bad things of the collective memory. Freud would cure that by channeling these negative emotions through politically appropriated containers. Having two mouths that speak simultaneously is confusing and embarrassing and this creates ‘kakophony’. In ancient Asia there was a statue representing a monster with two mouths. According to the writer this was a proof of manipulating the female identity. She is relating that to oxymoron of playboy magazine that puts together photos of naked women and articles of feminists, facilitating the masculine fantasy on ‘sophrosyne’ and repression. She is then questioning how much our presumptions on gender affect the way we hear the others.

The writer concludes by asking if there is another idea of human order and essence rather than repression, self-control and dissociation of inside and outside, going beyond the idea of the self.

Carson brings in my mind the association of the female voice with the collective voice expressing the deep dark side of our human nature. I think that is what a patriarchal society is afraid of. Aspects of our nature, like birth and death, have been repressed and demonized by religion and states. How dark they are at the end? I agree with her that this gender based notion on the unspeakable words is very active still until today. I would like to see what is its metaphor and reality in the contemporary digital and networking world? It is also very common today that the loud and high-pitched voice is very disrespectful. Another point I want to highlight is the gender binary on public and private. According to the text of Rose Gibbs “Speech matters...” the philosophical western thought, based on the ancient Greek philosophers, supports the division between private and public sphere. In the public sphere everybody should be human but the inside of private domains is ruled by a domestic power where violence is permitted. This has reached to the point were in the public spaces men are the operators of politics. It is interesting how in this text it also the voice part of this binary: public-private, male-female, low-pitched-high-pitched, politics-talkativeness/unspeakable things. The last association would be also be like that: politics-talkativeness/unspeakable things/gossiping.


Ελιάνα Καναβέλη, Φύλο, φόβος και δημόσιος λόγος (2012)

Abstract
Kanaveli talks about the relations of gender, fear and public space that are connected through an invisible net of power relations.

Synopsis
Kanaveli talks about the relations of gender, fear and public space that are connected through an invisible net of power relations. In order to deconstruct the dominant situation and understand their connection we have to see them as social structures. She defines gender not only as the embodied identity but also as an organisational principle of society. It is produced by everyday social roles and is reflected in the space. The representations of gender and space are not immutable but they consolidate dominant realities because of their repetition. Different notions on femininity construct different ideas of fear for crime. The writer observes that “emphasizing "fear" and its negative effects on women, reproduce stereotyped notions of women's "weakness"” (Ελιάνα Καναβέλη, 2012). Some women though overpass this idea and claim their space in public. She then defines space as a subjective social structure that depends on the person that experiences it. The gender, nation and cultural context of that person defines the relation with the space that is made visible through the power relations. The latter not only construct the spaces but also set their limits, who is excluded and who is included. The gender binary affects the social construction of space. Women, for example, are related to housewifization and the private sphere of the house. According to Kevin Fox Gotham (Ελιάνα Καναβέλη, 2012), territorial restrictions, identities and meanings are negotiable, as they are defined through social interaction and controversy. Thus the space is the material of the human action and the outcome of the social interactions. Kanaveli observes that the outside space has been historically connected to the male gendered subjects. Public spaces has been turned in gender constructions that privatize men and female subjects are expressing their needs and desires through them. This notion together with the idea that women are vulnerable lead to the normalization of fear of women in the outside space. Their presence in inappropriate and dangerous spaces is their responsibility. The male perspective has formed the idea on public sphere and its limits. So some categories of the population have been excluded from the public space and from the dominant forms of address. The idea that women are excluded from the public space because of the male violence doesn't mean that men are excluding women. There are complicated power relations that create that exclusion. According to Foucault (Ελιάνα Καναβέλη, 2012), power is not imposed on people but is transferred through them. The writer interrogates how a public space is formed and her answer is the exclusion of subjects that have different political, cultural and moral principles from the dominant. That creates parallel actions and forms of address. Public speech is one representation of the public space. It is a confirmation of existence of the subject and co-existence, but also gives and produces power that affects others. Public speech provides visibility and audibility, or otherwise publicity for the person that practices it. Freedom of speech relates to the political participation and in theory everyone can have it but in practice unwritten rules and power relations define what is going to be said and from whom. The author believes that the factor of fear intervenes in that. These rules construct the public sphere and restrict female subjects in expressing harmless speeches. This creates conversations about things that are difficult to be heard. This means that these speeches are shared in low-voice and sometimes used as weapons against others or to express indirectly the pain of the subject. The result of these actions is that the voices and speeches of women in public are directed to “non-listening ears” and they remain silent.

She concludes that in times of political and social liquidity nothing is consolidated and forms of questioning and resistance are emerging. Thus a new ground appears for the presence of female subjectivities that are going against these unwritten rules, claim their own space and articulate their own speech.

From this article it seems that the binary of public and private sphere is based on gender assumptions and fear directed to a specific category of the population. The consolidation of the separation of female and male presence in private and public spaces is based on that fear. Kanaveli talks a lot about the exclusion and inclusion of female subjects from the spaces of appearance and power, that I find urgent. Suffragettes were addressing that topic in the early 20s but it is still a very problematic relation that I agree is based on stable social constructions (public space, gender, fear) that we take for granted. Further on, I would like to relate the notion of Carson on the continuity of the female speech. It has been established that our inner desires and needs have to be expressed indirectly through speech and in the case of women through their men’s speech. Final, the last part of her text refers to the “things that are difficult to be heard” because of the low voice that I would relate with the practice of gossiping that has been accused as a bad form of address, specifically of women. But how this is accused and underestimated when women are silenced from the public sphere.

  • Bangma, Anke. 2011. Resonant Bodies, Voices, Memories. Berlin: Revolver.
  • Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Edited by Alenka Zupancic and Slavoj Žižek. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. ===
  • Ronell, Avital. 1991. [The Telephone Book: Technology - Schizophrenia - Electric Speech]. University of Nebraska Press. ===
  • Augoyard, J.-F., Torgue, H., 2006. Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal ; Ithaca.
  • Harold, B., n.d. A Map of Misreading.
  • Ronell, A., 1991. [The Telephone Book: Technology - Schizophrenia - Electric Speech]. University of Nebraska Press.
  • Turkle, S., 2016. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Reprint edition. ed. Penguin Books, New York.
  • Cardiff
  • Latour, B., Weibel, P. (Eds.), 2005. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, First edition. ed. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. : Karlsruhe, Germany.

Voice technologies and public space/control

Welle. Automatic speech analysis software used to verify refugees’ dialects (2017)

Abstract
This article is about Germany’s tactic to verify refugees claims of origin with the use of speech analysis software. A linguistic expert argues that such technology and process can be very wrong and inaccurate.

Synopsis
This article is about Germany’s tactic to verify refugees claims of origin with the use of speech analysis software. Since 90s Germany has used speech analysis with the aid of linguistic experts, who recognize dialectic variations in uncertain recorded clips. In 2018 Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) is planning to use automated dialect analysis which is based on the same technology used by companies and banks. More specifically, audio samples from refugees will be collected and given as input to a software.

However, Professor Monika Schmid, a linguistic expert, argues that such technology, and even the experts involved, can be very wrong and inaccurate. She claims that the process of recognizing the origin of someone by his/her speech is very complex. For example, the interviewees may adapt to the speech patterns of their interviewer. Some tests proved that human and machines can be wrong. Native German speakers were asked to recognise samples of other Germans living abroad for a long time. They recognized them as foreign speakers. The acoustic analysis had the same results.

She concludes that both humans and machines can be wrong, but maybe people can better realize this.

Even though the speech analysis technology is not perfect, it is interesting to think about how a state uses it to such a serious topic on which people’s lives are depend on. Big institutions, companies and states are always flirting with the process of automation as a way to do things faster and it seems that it is more trusted than the subjective opinion of the simple humans. It seems that the voice of the voiceless is manipulated and turned against them, but how this voice and technology can be used and understood on a way that gives back the voice to the people? I am thinking about the importance of the text [Situated Knowledges] that supports the idea of not trusting the one God, science and technology. This article also reminds me of the interview of Slavoj Zizek [Are liberals and populists just searching for a new master? ] in which he talks about the post-human condition in which the machine and the human are becoming intertwined.



Estranged public space and art

Saskia Sassen. The Shifting Meaning of the Urban Condition (2012)

This is a more theoretical text that enhance my knowledge on public spaces theories and helps me to relate them with media theory.

Abstract
In this text Saskia Sassen raises questions about the making of public space and the current urban conditions. Massive structures and branding are the basic mediation between individuals and market, in the cities and the digital world. Design amplifies those processes and adds value for the shake of utility logics of the economic corporate worlds. However there are other public and political making works, mostly artistic, that can produce counter-practices and make them legible to the local and the powerless. Street level politics, like the Occupy Movement, and digital activism, like the Free Software movement, played an important role to the creation of those “counter-geographies of globalisation” , as Sassen calls them.

Occupy angeliki2.jpg
This is part of a project on Occupy movements and public gatherings. Angeliki Diakrousi Department of Architecture, University of Patras February-June 2012

Synopsis

Monumental and high-tech architecture in the cities “have produced displacement and estrangement” and gradually cities turn from “civic to politicized urban spaces”. Simultaneously degraded and semi-abandoned spaces appear, called terrains vague. These areas exist outside of the utility logics of the city and are claimed from real estate agencies as a new territory for new high towers of offices. However architecture and design can propose other ways of perceiving that space through “critical artistic practices”.

To answer her questions she introduces the making of public as a way to refuse the constant privatization and weaponization of the public space. The dominant royal and state architectures are related to public access to those urban spaces and not on how to make spaces public. The small practices of people and the new network technologies though do that in weird places, terrains vague, outside of the utility logic. This possibility of “making, detecting and intervening” has being intense the last decades together with the privatization of the public spaces. The state has also weaponized the urban space through surveillance and physical restrictions that changes the landscapes together with the commercial gentrification. Those gestures refer to public access and not to the public space. The subjectivities of people can propose “diverse kinds of publicness” that make a space public. According to Sassen, several reasons facilitate such practices and imaginaries. The first is that the restriction of the public spaces in the shake of access and monumental architectures reduce the experiences of the people in the city. A second reason is the creation of modest public spaces in response to the monumentalized spaces that focuses between the private and public power. This option of making repositions the modest spaces in potentially global networks that include multiple localities. Last reason is the existence of multiculturalism in the cities that affects and challenges the experiences and notions of the public. The occupy movement was one form of public-space making. The Global Street stands for urban street in a big city hosting struggles like the Occupy Movement. Street and square hosts activities while boulevard and piazza rituals in the traditional notion of a city. Occupy movements happened simultaneously around the world with similar politics even though they were in different countries. The city seems to become a space where the powerless make themselves visible. Like in North Africa and Middle East those movements didn't give power to the participants but they made history and claimed a new territory in a period of growing injustice and inequality. Territory is one strategy of all these occupy tactics. For Sassen it is a complex situation that involves logics of power and claim making and its meaning is not just about a national piece of land. The use of communication technologies and especially social media in movements like these were intensively discussed concerning their unrealised potentials. According to the writer there is a confusion between the logic of the technology designed by the engineers and the ones of the user. Facebook for example is used for spreading the word of very diverse collective events even if they have different aims and ideologies, but they focus in communicating rapidly something. She proposes to see this “electronic interactive domain” as a part of the larger ecologies beyond its technicality and redefine them more conceptually.

She observes that in the cities today a big mix of people coexist. The ones who lack power can make themselves present through face to face communication. According to the writer this condition reveals another type of politics and political actors, based on hybrid contexts of acting and outside of the formal system. The city is a more concrete space for action than the nation, in which the unofficial political subjects are represented invisibly. The urban space hosts several political activities like squatting, demonstrations, politics of culture and identity that are visible on the street and non dependent on massive media technologies. New network technologies help on local struggles, enabling crossborder political activism and contributing to the creation of “fragmented topographies”. We experience local as a concrete form or building but it is also located in networks. New urban spatiality is partial in terms of administrative boundaries or in the sense of multiple public imaginaries present in parts of the city. The more globalized and digitized markets, that dominate the city , are, the more their central management becomes strategic and the cities are important for this central operation. She gives the example of real estate, as a “microenvironment with global span”. Even though it is digitally circulated, it remains physical. Its partial representation blurs the borders between those two presences. We should understand that even the most dematerialized activities are strongly grounded in financial centers.

The writer, subsequently, thinks of new media artists as the ones that may propose alternatives and counter globalities that differ from the corporate and elitistic ones. They use computer based network technologies that give presence to multiple local actors, projects and imaginaries. These interventions, as Sassen calls them, are using different technologies, politically or artistically, that can subvert the corporate globalization. Hacking has transformed in a term used for projects beyond its specialized technical discource. Free software movement and Indymedia are examples of gaining terrain to the mainstream mediums and properties. She thinks that new type of globality is created when “local initiatives and projects can become part of a global network without losing the focus on the specifics of the local”. She uses the term “counter-geographies of globalization” to refer to those subversive interventions into the space of global capitalism. Their practices strengthen the translocal networks and develop communication technologies that escape conventional surveillance practices, even though they use the same global economic system with the corporate firms. The new media artists and activists are key factors for the development of practices of “narrating, giving shape, making present, involved in digitized environments”.

Concluding she says that massive structures and branding are the basic mediation between individuals and market. Design amplifies those processes and adds value for the shake of utility logics of the economic corporate worlds. However there are other public and political making works “that can produce disruptive narratives, and make it legible to the local and the silenced.”

In this text I see many relations to the radio art as political act contesting the regulations and restrictions to airwaves. Our political action exist in multiple public spheres that surrounds us and the electromagnetic spectrum is one of them. Another reason of estranged spaces, terrain vagues, is the appropriation of names in the cities by the state and the market. As O’Rourke(pg. 5) observes: “the supression of local names, in favor of gutless administrative ones [estranges] people from the world they live in”. I agree that through people subjectivites can propose ways of making a space public, and the formation of them I think that can be related to the situated knowledge, a term developed by Donna Haraway.

  • Auge, M., 2009. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, 2 edition. ed. Verso, London ; New York.
  • Feminist Art of Failure, Ewa Partum and the Weak Avant-Garde | Majewska | Widok. Teorie i praktyki kultury wizualnej [WWW Document], n.d. URL http://pismowidok.org/index.php/one/article/view/370/918 (accessed 8.26.18).
  • Kwon, M., 2004. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, 1st edition. ed. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
  • Manovich, L., 2006. The Poetics of Augmented Space. Visual Communication - VIS COMMUN 5, 219–240. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357206065527
  • Oliver Marchart, 2011. Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s). archive public.
  • Smith, N., 2005. The Politics of Public Space, 1 edition. ed. Routledge, New York.

Trans/ parallel/streaming

Structure of thesis

Other

Donna Haraway. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (1988)

This text inform my research with a more feministic approach and supports my research on female practices and voices but also my general approach in the project.

Abstract

In this text Donna Haraway put the question on how objectivity should be defined in the science world. She proposes a feminist science, which is based in the situated knowledge, opposed to the monotheistic and military approach of todays scientists, which is illusionary. Through these lines she develops her arguments about an embodied objectivity which depends on the position of the individual. This partial perspective is non-illusionary and provides space for interaction with others’ visions and thus the development of a universal knowledge from the bottom.

  • Gascia Ouzounian. Sound Art and Spatial Practices : Situating Sound Installation Art since 1958 (2008) ===
  • Chantal Mouffe, n.d. Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism.
  • Hand, B., 1999. Public Art Indoors: Sound and Art in Public Spaces. Circa 42–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/25563399
  • Latour, B., Weibel, P. (Eds.), 2005. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, First edition. ed. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. : Karlsruhe, Germany.
  • Noy, I., 2017. Emergency Noises: Sound Art and Gender, New edition edition. ed. Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, New York.
  • Ouzounian, G., n.d. Visualizing Acoustic Space: The Story of Poème électronique. Revue Circuit.
  • Slouka, M., 1999. Listening for silence. Harper’s Magazine.
  • Tonkiss, F., 2003. Aural postcards: sound, memory and the city, in: Bull, M., Back, L. (Eds.), The Auditory Culture Reader. Berg Publishers, Oxford, pp. 303–310.
  • Tucker, 2017. Organize Your Own Temporality by Rasheedah Phillips. Organize Your Own.
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