"The Urban Speaker" - Design for This Century
Public art interventions are an interesting artifact for analysis: interventions use a variety of devices to communicate their intended effect; their contexts may be specific but their outcomes are broad; therefore, interventions are simple in their implementation but produce a complexity of experiences leveraging the cultural context in which they operate. A valuable aspect of public behavior in urban settings is that they are controlled by unstated but widely understood social conventions. The Urban Speaker by Carlos J. Gómez de Llerena uses these widely understood signifiers to instigate interactions confronting the hegemonic phenomenon of the loudest voice wins.
Description In the words of de Llerena, the Urban Speaker is “an art installation that transforms public space into an instant stage for mass communication. This portable urban furniture allows people to broadcast their voice in public by calling a telephone number from their mobile phones.”1 A tripod disguised as a construction barrier supports a pole with two aluminum signs placed at the top. These instruction signs use typography and layout typically seen conveying public information and traffic laws. At the top of the pole is a loudspeaker connected to a smartphone and a large battery, both of which are hidden in the base. This battery and smart phone configuration makes the project quite portable. The signage asks the viewer to call the posted number to “speak in public” and also offers a QR (quick response) code that directs users to urbanspeaker.mobi to hear other calls, watch video and find out when and where the next Urban Speaker will be set up. Users who call the specified number are automatically answered by the system and can speak their mind publicly for sixty seconds after which the call is terminated. The intervention was installed at the south end of Tompkins Square Park for one day, October 8, 2010, from 3-7 pm. The project was developed by de Llarena and the Wooster Collective as part of the Conflux 2010 festival in New York City. Video documentation of the interaction shot by de Llarena shows passers by confused by the voices emanating from the speaker and looking to the camera for clarification. Several users attempted to call the system at close range only to accidentally broadcast their own feedback loop. The experience has little instruction beyond advertising the ability to amplify whatever you say into your phone out to the world.
Issues Freedom of speech and expression are the primary issues addressed in the Urban Speaker project. On de Llarena’s website he states that “temporary interventions such as this seek to re-imagine what our personal and social experience of public spaces can be in an age of ubiquitous nonstop communication.”2 As an intervention the project addresses the culture of public space ownership within an urban setting and specifically how New Yorkers use their valuable public spaces. Many public places in New York City are often private or facilitated at the expense of a private entity. Nonetheless the culture cultivated in and around these spaces can especially potent and the Urban Speaker makes visible such a contentious nature.
Reviews in local papers and blogs noted the perceived threat of profanity or statements of violence being broadcast through the park, with the Village Voice pointing out that park regulars the “Tompkins Junkies aren't exactly going to be happy about [the Urban Speaker].”3 The broadest audience addressed by de Llarena’s piece are members of any democratic society attempting to use a public space as a place of discourse. Anonymous commentary on society and government is an important element of public discourse. Anonymous satirical writings were published as pamphlets to foment the Colonialist’s cause for the Revolutionary War and have remained a staple of American democratic discourse. Public statement of opinions fosters discussion and with which citizens might be able to more fully express their frustrations with society and governance at large. From this context de Llarena is taking this democratic tradition and using the medium of instant telecommunication to explore and expand the meaning of speaking in public in the 21st century.
Contexts The openness of the Urban Speaker project due to the unscripted content embodies the practice of anonymous commenting on discussions boards and websites. Public forums have rapidly become an integral component of democratic society but have receded from real life into the blogosphere. Communications technology facilitates immediate response within the public forum of the internet, but anonymity and unidirectionality create non-contextualized streams of opinions and reactions that, when viewed outside of the immediacy of their context, can be read as hyperbolic and bombastic. These commentaries are meant to instigate readers (listeners) to similar action, creating a loop of argument with little problem solving value and no focused goal.
The location of the piece in Tompkins Square Park is not an unconsidered one. The history of the park is marked by many protests including the Civil War Draft Riots and later in the 19th century was a hub for labor organizing. In 1874, the Tompkins Square Riot occurred when police crushed a demonstration by thousands of workers, marking the beginning of an unprecedented era of labor conflict. In 1988 a riot erupted when the police tried to clear the park of homeless people and afterward the park was adopted as a symbolic location for tenant’s rights activists to gather.
Illustration of how J.R. Baldwin’s “The People’s Skype” works in response to Zuccotti park’s rules restricting use of amplified sound within the park.
It is illuminating to compare the Urban Speaker’s implementation with how similar tools are being deployed in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Urban Speaker presaged the OWS movement by nearly a year and both of these public interventions pull into focus the current state of public discourse. At Zuccotti Park occupiers were speaking out in public daily but were prohibited from using amplification to broadcast speeches to the ever growing crowd. A method called “The People’s Mic” evolved out of this prohibition. First, a speaker says a few words in a normal voice, no more than half a sentence at a time. The speaker will then pause while many people sitting nearby will repeat the same words together loudly, thus amplifying the speaker. Those sitting at the far edges of the circle will repeat the same words again, to let the speaker and facilitators know that they are being heard clearly by everyone in the group.4
A contrasting project to the Urban Speaker is J. R. Baldwin’s “The People’s Skype”, a one-way conference call system designed to facilitate a distributed PA system at OWS General Assemblies5. This project sprang from a context of great need and a focused goal of spreading public speech that was being directly curbed by the denial of a PA system permit within the privately owned Zuccotti Park.
Analysis and Assessment Aspects of the Urban Speaker project attempt to empower the individual and on the surface de Llarena achieves that goal. The Urban Speaker engages in the discussion of rights to public speech with a random sampling of members of society in Tompkins Square Park. Any number of the users of the intervention might not be aware of their public speech rights. Many are satisfied with declaring their opinions in a private conversation or anonymously online. What de Llarena does most effectively with this project is take a device, the mobile phone, and translate ownership of one into a method for public speech, empowering everyone, even those with landlines in their homes, to speak out in public. Every citizen has a voice and de Llarena wants everyone to know that with technology ones voice is amplified, perhaps even more so than without technology. The Urban Speaker illuminates the messiness of direct democracy, how a random sampling of park goers in an afternoon will produce just as many opinions. Once the novelty of speaking out unexpectedly in public has worn off a user might wonder at other opportunities to voice their opinions. Private phone calls and likewise anonymous rants on the internet facilitate an isolation from any consequences of public speech. The portability and broad accessibility of the Urban Speaker connect those consequences to the reality of a public forum.
But these same technological advances that enable amazing consumer gadgets like iPhones and the creation of the Urban Speaker also help to fuel ominous government surveillance projects. In his paper on the government use of information technology John Villasenor determines that “the ability of information technology to shift the balance of power away from repressive regimes and in favor of their opponents are temporary.”6 Free public speech is at greater risk of being curbed as it becomes cheaper and even more effective for governments, especially authoritarian ones, to record and monitor everything that is being said and has been said even before the speaker becomes a target of observation.
Hegemony as related to the control of information in the name of protecting democratic ideals is nothing new. As Alexander Meiklejohn has argued, “Democracy will not be true to its essential ideal if those in power are able to manipulate the electorate by withholding information and stifling criticism.”7 The implementation of these observation techniques is already well established. The Thai government recently jailed a Thai-born American citizen Joe W. Gordon for 2.5 years for posting links to a translation of a banned book on his own blog8. The signing of the USA PATRIOT Act into law in 2001 made broad sweeping changes to established laws governing surveillance of American citizens, allowing extensive government surveillance phone and email communications. So while de Llarena’s project attempts to empower the individual he does not achieve social empowerment of disenfranchised groups in the context of modern information technology’s facilitation of communication between citizens.
The Occupy Wall Street movement does a better job of avoiding the establishment a power structure by not declaring a leader. Oppressive power structures are interested in maintaining the status quo and are apt to stifle the free flow of discourse. The presence of a voice speaking in public at Zuccotti Park requires the speaker be identified and that what they are saying be reaffirmed by the crowd participating in the speech via the People’s Mic. The People’s Skype is an excellent example of social empowerment via the individual empowerment of a mobile communications device.
Lessons/Implications The implications of the recent OWS would lend more serious context to the Urban Speaker project. From the point of view of a participating protester, one might see the project as a precursor to the voices raised in unison on Wall Street less than a year after it was installed. Originally setup as an outlet for general frustration the Urban Speaker evolved into a collective voice of discontent, unified by a technology that can often be isolating. When viewed from the point of view of a city official granting park permits today they might judge the Urban Speaker as a harmless art project granted permit for amplification. But a voluble social movement like Occupy Wall Street? No permit would be granted but that only makes for more challenging situations and the innovative tools we can create to change our existing situation into the preferable one.
1 http://www.med44.com/pages/urbanspeaker.html
2 http://www.med44.com/pages/urbanspeaker.html
3 http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2010/10/art_stunts_urba.php
4 http://www.litkicks.com/PeoplesMic
6 Villasenor, John (2011) Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments. Brookings Institute.
7 Marlin, Randal (2002). Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion. Broadview Press. pp. 226–227.
8 http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/08/world/asia/thailand-american-insults/index.html