<divalign="center"><br><br><spanstyle="font-size: 30px;"><b>Let' s Talk About Unspeakable Things</b></span> <spanstyle="color:pink;">by Angeliki Diakrousi</span></div><br><br>
<divclass="draggable"style="top: 1713px;left: 147px;"><divclass="tooltip-wrap"style="text-decoration:underline;"><atarget="_blank"href="carson-list.jpg"><imgsrc="carson-list.jpg"width="800px"></a><divclass="tooltip-content-right"><div>Figure 1: Describing how female voices sound like
<divclass="tooltip-wrap"style="text-decoration:underline;"><atarget="_blank"href="../../images/katalin.jpg"><imgsrc="../../images/katalin.jpg"width="500px"></a><divclass="tooltip-content-right"><div>Figure 2: Vocal performance of Katalin Ladik
<divclass="tooltip-wrap"style="text-decoration:underline;"><atarget="_blank"href="../../images/laurie.jpg"><imgsrc="../../images/laurie.jpg"width="500px"></a><divclass="tooltip-content-right"><div>Figure 5: Performance from Laurie Anderson
<divclass="tooltip-wrap"style="text-decoration:underline;"><atarget="_blank"href="../../images/occupy-davis-butler.jpg"><imgsrc="../../images/occupy-davis-butler.jpg"width="1000px"></a><divclass="tooltip-content-right"><div>Figure 6: Speeches of Angela Davis and Judith Butler in Occupy Wall Street
<divclass="tooltip-wrap"style="text-decoration:underline;"><atarget="_blank"href="../../images/feminists.JPG"><imgsrc="../../images/feminists.JPG"width="500px"></a><divclass="tooltip-content-right"><div>Figure 8: Speech Matters: Violence and the Feminist Voice
<divclass="tooltip-wrap"style="text-decoration:underline;"><atarget="_blank"href="../../images/broadcastcart.jpg"><imgsrc="../../images/broadcastcart.jpg"width="500px"></a><divclass="tooltip-content-right"><div>Figure 9: 'The Broadcast Cart' of Miranda Zúñiga transmitting
<divclass="tooltip-wrap"style="text-decoration:underline;"><atarget="_blank"href="../../images/twomouths.jpg"><imgsrc="../../images/twomouths.jpg"width="500px"></a><divclass="tooltip-content-right"><div>Figure 10: A sculpture of Baubo, goddess of sacred and sexual humor
<divclass="tooltip-wrap"style="text-decoration:underline;"><atarget="_blank"href="../../images/liveoccupy.jpg"><imgsrc="../../images/liveoccupy.jpg"width="500px"></a><divclass="tooltip-content-right"><div>Figure 11: Live streaming from Occupy Wall Street
</p><pid="dashed">Title: Let's Talk About Unspeakable Things<br/>
</p><pid="dashed">Student number: 0956090<br/>
</p><pid="dashed">Thesis, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the final examination for Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design: Experimental Publishing. Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy.<br/>
</p><pid="dashed">Adviser: Steve Rushton<br/>
</p><pid="dashed">Second Reader: Kate Briggs</p><p>Word count: 8380</p><p></p><p></p><p></p>
<h1id="introduction">Introduction</h1><h2id="speaking-listening-and-making-space">Speaking, listening and making space</h2><p>This thesis is a series of three essays which relate to female and collective voices, and their mediation. They address the voice as a feminist tool for communication; studying how the female voice creates conditions for forms of listening and making space. Historically, some modes of address have been marginalized and shut out of the public domain. Collective voices are marginalized under the realm of patriarchal individualistic society. Even though voice is a medium for collective practice it is situated in a context that tends towards social binary structures and oppositions that restrict its possibilities. These binaries, which favor the 'civilized white male' subjectivities, have held influence on Western thinking since antiquity. Nevertheless, the nature of voice and its mediation overpass oppositions of gender, nationality, culture, space, technology and power relations. My research seeks to unravel these political capabilities of voices, in order to explore democratic ways of communication that embrace excluded forms of address.</p><p>In recent years, my concern has been with the presence of female voices in public. During my previous studies I came to realize how my gendered body had been silenced or marginalized through subtle gestures from male figures or institutional powers. By observing women in their roles as members of my family, teachers, workers and immigrant neighbors of my youth, I discovered different types of marginalization and silencing. Examples such as women who worked at home, taking care of traditional 'domestic duties' while neglecting their own desires and interests; men interrupting them when they articulate arguments in a political or formal dialogue, routinely underestimating their knowledge. Growing up, I also encountered other forms of commonly suppressed feminine-female expressions. The mediation of their voices and the way they became present, active, visible participants in the public sphere became one of my principle interests. My past artistic projects responded to that concern while I worked with voice and sound; which, as forms of art, are underestimated in the context of Western visual culture. As this text will outline, they are forms connected to irrational attitudes. Throughout history, oral cultures, by being based on vocal expression, differ from more recently established literate cultures in that they embrace the collective sharing of knowledge through voice. More specifically they create "personality structures that in certain ways are more communal and externalized, and less introspective than those common among literates" (Ong, 2002, pg. 67). In recent times, feminists have embraced voice in their practices because there is a uniqueness in it, that embodies the speakers and their personal stories, while connecting to present listeners. Together with these concerns, about the exclusion of women's voices, I also experienced a gender-based differentiation between amateur and expert knowledge, particularly when approaching telecommunication networks and technologies, with the intention of learning to build and use them for my artistic practice<ahref="#fn1"class="footnoteRef"id="fnref1"><sup>1</sup></a>. This division of labor goes alongside the more general gender exclusion I discuss in this text.</p><p>In one of my projects, <em>Sound Acts in Victoria Square</em> I 'inserted' the recorded sounds of women's voices into existing conversations at a public square in Athens that was male dominated. Most of the frequenters were immigrants and refugees from different periods of migration to Greece. The gender bias and the way they used the public space differed according to their country of origin. However, it was common that many of the young women visiting the square were just passers-by with shopping bags or kids in tow. The men, on the other hand, were hanging out with their friends, occupying many spots of the square for hours. My inte
The idea that women are excluded from public space because of male violence doesn't mean that men directly exclude women. There are complicated power relations that create this exclusion. Freedom of speech relates to 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. These rules construct the public sphere and restrict women, queer people or any other marginalized groups in expressing harmless thoughts. Throughout history, women, for example, can defend themselves publicly and their concerns in extreme circumstances, such as when they have been raped, but cannot speak for men or their community (Beard, 2017). The voices and speeches of these subjectivities in public are directed to 'non-listening ears'.</p><<p>In the radio program <em>Radio Fresh</em> in Syria – an example I will return in the next chapter – when women started to broadcast and host their own radio programs, an extremist group, Nusra, stopped them from speaking on air. Nusra refused to listen to whatever they want to say, because they were women. The group said that female voices in public is like a form of 'nakedness', that should not be exposed. However, when women transformed their voices technically to a male register – technicians helped them to change electronically the quality of their voice as they speak in the microphone – everybody would listen carefully to their words. For the purpose of making their own radio program, and include their voices in airwaves, they changed the gender of their voice. Their female body accepted a distortion into male. And by extension, the distorted mediation of their voice broke the fixed gender binary regarding their bodies being in public.</p><<h2id="the-roots-of-collective-voice">The Roots of Collective Voice</h2><p>According to Walter Ong (2002, pg. 67), "[o]ral communication unites people in groups. Writing and reading [of literate cultures] are solitary activities that throw the psyche back on itself". Orality, or thought and verbal expression which is not based on writing and reading skills, has still a presence in contemporary Western cultures. It has been transformed into a new orality that "has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment (...) But it is essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality" (Ong. pg.13). However, the rational individualistic democracy stands against this collective vocalization that includes the sounds of all the other species and marginalized genders. But mainly it is a reminder of a primitive human mode of address that creates alienation and feelings of fear of looking back.</p><p>Since ancient times, the association of the female voices with bestiality and disorder justifies the tactic of patriarchal culture to 'put a gag' over the female mouth. Different mechanisms have been developed to exclude specific forms of address from the public which are based on complicated power relations in society. Collective and female vocalizations are perceived as threats to society and thus undergo filtration and 'normalization'– in a way of silencing and imposing self-control. They get regulated and rational, restricting passions and desires. From my perspective the female utterance was embracing the primitive and irrational human nature, but articulating their own form of speech – although it was a tool of the rational contemporary man – and challenging the dichotomy between the past and present.<br/>
</p><h1id="multiplication-vis-a-vis-amplification">2. Multiplication Vis a Vis Amplification</h1><p>Ong mentions that “[a]t the same time, with telephone, radio, television and various kinds of sound tape, electronic technology has brought us into the age of 'secondary orality'” (Ong, 2002, pg. 13). This type of orality includes elements from oral cultures, but also incorporates the high technology of media and exists in the literate cultures. In this new orality, the use of media affects the performance of speech and verbal communication. One of its main characteristics is the telepresence of the speaker. Television, for example, allowed politicians to speak, from one place, to a larger audience spread around the world. The technologies of amplification devices, that convey the embodied and the distant voice, enhance the presence of the person carrying it. They give the ability to be here now and at the same time elsewhere. The mediating role of all kinds of media that detach the voice from its physical proprietor, enables "its circulation in places and contexts in which physical bodies may not have access" (Panopoulos) and enables others to listen to that speaker even if they are not sharing the same space. The medium still creates bonds between them, and channels for sharing knowledge, it always relates us to the absent other through the sense of listening.</p><h2id="the-mediation-of-voice-through-multiplication">The mediation of voice through multiplication</h2><p>Urban spaces host a variety of political activities such as squatting, demonstrations, displays of the politics of culture and identity which are visible on the street and which are not dependent on mainstream media technologies. Since the beginning of human societies there has been a need for gatherings and sharing knowledge through verbal communication. Today the agonistic dynamics of primitive oral thought, which have effected the development of Western literate culture, have been "institutionalized by the 'art' of rhetoric, and by the related dialectic of Socrates and Plato, which furnished agonistic oral verbalization with a scientific base" (Ong, 2002, pg. 45). 'Agonistic pluralism' – a term proposed by Chantal Mouffe – is a type of democracy that acknowledges the multiplicity of voices and values, as well as conflicts of contemporary pluralist societies.<ahref="#fn2"class="footnoteRef"id="fnref2"><sup>2</sup></a>.</p><p>On the other hand, speech act, as outlined by J. L. Austin is distinct from rhetoric and reasoned argument in that it puts in action what has been said<ahref="#fn3"class="footnoteRef"id="fnref3"><sup>3</sup></a>(Austin, 1962, pg. 1). It requires appropriate use of language within a given culture or context. Speech act is based on performative utterances, whereby somebody performs, makes things happen and creates a space for action, rather than simply stating a fact. The presence of the body in a speech act provides a layer of trust and safety. In a contemporary context, public speeches happen in both physical and digital spaces with the help of several media like Internet (podcasts and live streaming) and radio (community radios). In the diverse media landscape individuals or groups can easily form and communicate speeches happening in a physical space by themselves without being dependent on a newspaper, publisher, the state or other institutional power. In the Occupy Movement <ahref="#fn4"class="footnoteRef"id="fnref4"><sup>4</sup></a> both known and unknown public speakers would spread their messages to an audience by standing in a public square. This action followed the principles of the Speaker's Corner<ahref="#fn5"class="footnoteRef"id="fnref5"><sup>5</sup></a>, which is an area where open-air public speaking and debate are allowed and it was first established in Britain at the end of 19th century. That is an example of the establishment of a speaking space, which is legitimate for public discourse and open for new forms of address. For example, in my project, <em>Sound Acts in Victoria
Interview via Jitsi<br/>
Speakers: Reni Hofmüller, Angeliki Diakrousi</p><p>(...) R: What I also like so much about radio, it really triggers fantasy. Or everything that is sound based. You don't see what is producing the sound. It includes the fantasies and imaginations of other people, who hear it. And that is something that is not that strong, of how I am, if I see a movie. The visual is also there. I can also dive into any cinema situation or TV or see something in a monitor, I don't mind. But I think this trigger of being more active is really the sound. That's why I keep loving doing radio. And its also much easier in the sense you need much less equipment and it is simply cheaper on all the levels, because there is so many things you dont need, so many things you need for visual.</p><p>A: Also radio is connected with the physical space, you have to set it up. I wanted to ask you about that. How it was when you set up pirate radio. How was this experience?</p><p>R: I mean one thing was, there has been I think at least three waves of pirate radio in Austria. We weren't the first one who tried that. But of course we did in a time.. we started doing it in the 1990s that the machinery was already quite small. It was simply easier to hide the transmitter, when it has the size of a cigarette pack. Cause the transmitter they used before it was much bigger and it needed more electricity. So, we had this small transmitter, which had five watch power, so it was really weak. It just reach parts of the city of Graz and then additionally we had a tape walkman to that. You have to think it's the beginning of the 1990s, so there is no mobile computers, accessible to us. There is no Internet, in the sense how we use it now. So everything is trouble, we use the imagination. We have this small cigarette pack size transmitter more or less. And we have this also very small walkman. Both can function with batteries, because it is also not very long time that we broadcast. And the antenna, it is a Yagi antenna, but it is not the fixed one. We used the ?clash? from a tent. So its foldable and then with aluminum stripes we glue the antenna on this clash. And we would hang the clash on a tree. We would go to one of the hills outside the city, surrounding the city. And we knew those who control the frequency band. You know you have the official administration for defining who is actually aloud to broadcast and then you have different bodies of administration that actually control what is happening in the frequency band and we knew where they are and we knew that they are constantly scanning what is happening in the band. The moment you switch on an additional transmitter they immediately see the pick and in a very short time- and I've seen them once doing it live- it takes them seconds to find out where you are. It is frustrating because 'chuck' (fingers sound) they have you. But then of course to actually catch you they have to physically go where you are. And we knew the time.. we always broadcast on Sunday noon, 1 pm, so we knew this is when people have this Sunday late breakfast/brunch think and they can listen to us and we knew that it would take the controlling body about 20 minutes to get from the place they are, a tower in the center of town, to go from there to the hill we were. So we had 18 minutes of broadcasting time and then we had to pack and disappear. That's what we did. So we did 18 to 20 minutes broadcast. And then you know, you just pack it in a little backpack, because it is so small, you can fold the antenna the two things are really small and then, you know. you are taking a stroll in a Sunday afternoon. (...)</p><h1id="bibliography">Bibliography</h1><p>Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press (The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955).</p><p>Ballout, D. (2019) 'Good Morning, Kafranbel', <em>Wartime Radio</em> This American Life. Available at: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/667/transcript (Accessed: 5 February 2019).</p><p>Beard, M. (2017) Women & Power: A Manifesto. 1 edition
-'Politics and Passions: the Stakes of Democracy', Ethical Perspectives, 7(2–3), pp. 146–150.</p><p>Ong, W. J. (2002) Orality and Literacy. 2 edition. London: Routledge.</p><p>Preston, J. (2011) 'Occupy Movement Shows Potential of Live Online Video', The New York Times, 11 December. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/business/media/occupy-movement-shows-potential-of-live-online-video.html (Accessed: 6 December 2018).</p><p>Rose Gibbs (2016) Speech Matters: Violence and the Feminist Voice, Institute of Contemporary Arts. Available at: https://archive.ica.art/bulletin/speech-matters-violence-and-feminist-voice (Accessed: 3 December 2018).</p><p>Sassen, S. (2012) 'The Shifting Meaning of the Urban Condition', archive public, 12 May. Available at: https://archivepublic.wordpress.com/texts/saskia-sassen/ (Accessed: 5 March 2019).</p><p></p><h1id="images">Images</h1><p>Figure 1<br/>
Diakrousi, 3 April 2019, <em>List of words and phrases, from Anne Carson's text The Gender of Sound, describing how female voices sound like</em>, collage, personal archive.</p><p>Figure 2<br/>
<em>Vocal performance of Katalin Ladik in the film 'Berberian Sound Studio', 2012. Her performance intended to create atmospheres of demonic voices through a woman's body</em>, screenshot, <ahref="https://www.youtube.com/watch?vTY96Ma6YdtQ"class="uri">https://www.youtube.com/watch?vTY96Ma6YdtQ</a>, personal archive.</p><p>Figure 3<br/>
<em>Cartoon from Riana Dunkan for Punch magazine</em>, image, Vázquez, J. F. (2018) 'There are None so Deaf', in Eckhardt, J., Grounds for Possible Music: On Gender, Voice, Language, and Identity. Errant Bodies Press, pp. 18–24.</p><p>Figure 4<br/>
<em>Cartoon from Gonzalo Rocha</em>, image, viewed 24 March 2019, <ahref="https://punch.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/Riana-Duncan-Cartoons/G0000Bx1FqQLTU1M/I0000eHEXGJ_wImQ"class="uri">https://punch.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/Riana-Duncan-Cartoons/G0000Bx1FqQLTU1M/I0000eHEXGJ_wImQ</a>.</p><p>Figure 5<br/>
<em>Piece 'Mach 20', album 'United States Live', from Laurie Anderson for 'The New Show' Season 1 (only season) Episode 8, March 16, 1984. She performs a male figure and her voice is electronically transformed in male</em>, screenshot, viewed 24 March 2019, <ahref="https://www.youtube.com/watch?vSirOxIeuNDE"class="uri">https://www.youtube.com/watch?vSirOxIeuNDE</a>.</p><p>Figure 6<br/>
Diakrousi, 2 February 2019, <em>Speeches Angela Davis and Judith Butler in Occupy Wall Street</em>, collage, viewed 4 March 2019, personal archive.</p><p>Figure 7<br/>
<em>'Mikrophoniki' demonstration in Athens</em>, image, viewed 4 March 2019, <ahref="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Lfzr2ZzEev0/VySC4WzJECI/AAAAAAAAFPY/NKYHFVcBBQEv1yIFTvlgTsQuVGk6doZgwCLcB/s1600/mikro-2_28-4-16.jpg"class="uri">https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Lfzr2ZzEev0/VySC4WzJECI/AAAAAAAAFPY/NKYHFVcBBQEv1yIFTvlgTsQuVGk6doZgwCLcB/s1600/mikro-2_28-4-16.jpg</a>.</p><p>Figure 8<br/>
Gibbs, <em>Speech Matters: Violence and the Feminist Voice</em>, image, viewed 4 March 2019, <ahref="https://archive.ica.art/sites/default/files/media/images/1200IMG_0682.JPG"class="uri">https://archive.ica.art/sites/default/files/media/images/1200IMG_0682.JPG</a>.</p><p>Figure 9<br/>
Miranda Zúñiga, <em>The Broadcast Cart transmitting</em>, image, viewed 4 March 2019, <ahref="http://www.ambriente.com/wifi/images/speaker1.jpg"class="uri">http://www.ambriente.com/wifi/images/speaker1.jpg</a>.</p><p>Figure 11<br/>
<em>A sculpture of Baubo, Greek goddess of sacred and sexual humor</em>, image, viewed 4 March 2019, <ahref="https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-60fe5061a107c045467540251797ad86"class="uri">https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-60fe5061a107c045467540251797ad86</a>.</p><p>Figure 12<br/>
<em>Live streaming from Occupy Wall Street</em>, image, viewed 4 March 2019, <ahref="http://www.dldewey.com/images/live2.jpg"class="uri">http://www.dldewey.com/images/live2.jpg</a>.</p><p></p><h1id="colophon">Colophon</h1><p>This work has been produced in the context of the graduation research of Angeliki Diakrousi from the Experimental Publishing (XPUB) Master course at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.</p><p>XPUB is a two year Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design that focuses on the intents, means and consequences of making things public and creating publics in the age of post-digital networks.</p><p>https://xpub.nl</p><p>This publication is based on the graduation thesis <em>Let's Talk About Unspeakable Things</em>, written under the supervision of Steve Rushton.</p><p>Special thanks to Steve Rushton, Kate Briggs, XPUB comrades and all my friends with whom I had interesting discussions that pushed my research further.</p><divclass="footnotes"><hr/><ol><liid="fn1"><p>I quickly found that I was not alone in this regard. The volunteers of an activist collective, Prometheus, expressed similar concerns in the construction of a radio station; "The radio activists presented the work of soldering a transmitter, tuning an antenna, and producing a news program or governing a radio station to be accessible to all. Nevertheless, they were conscious of patterned gaps in their organization and volunteer base: men were more likely than women to know how to build electronics, to be excited by tinkering, and to have the know-how to teach neophytes.This troubled the activists"(Dunbar-Hester, pg. 53-54).<ahref="#fnref1">↩</a></p></li><liid="fn2"><p>'Agonistic pluralism' is based on 'agonism', instead of competitive antagonism, which means that people can see each other as adversaries who disagree, rather than enemies. Mouffe says that "a pluralist democracy cannot be to reach a rational consensus in the public sphere" (Mouffe, 2000a, pg. 104), because such a consensus cannot exist as it always implies a form of exclusion. 'Agonism' can be achieved by providing channels through which all collective passions can be expressed and mobilized towards democratic approaches between adversaries – rather than a process of rational persuasion that refuses the existence of such passions.<ahref="#fnref2">↩</a></p></li><liid="fn3"><p>Speech act is when a sentence performs an action, like when a priest pronounces a couple 'husband and wife'. It is about sentences that express commands, wishes, questions and so on.<ahref="#fnref3">↩</a></p></li><liid="fn4"><p>Occupy Movement is an international movement since 2011 for social and economic justice and new forms of democracy based on public assemblies<ahref="#fnref4">↩</a></p></li><liid="fn5"><p>It "symbolizes the kind of forum for debate sought for today's post-industrial, highly mediated cities, encouraging face-to-face interaction and real-life conversation, albeit arranged by people texting each other, recorded by shooting and uploading video on YouTube, reported on twitter or documented on face book" (Speakers Corner Trust, no date).<ahref="#fnref5">↩</a></p></li><liid="fn6"><p>Kanaveli (Kanaveli, 2012) maintains that something that is visible and can be heard is reality and can create and give power.<ahref="#fnref6">↩</a></p></li><liid="fn7"><p>"With cellphones, iPads and video cameras affixed to laptops, Occupy participants showed that almost anyone could broadcast live news online. In addition, they could help build an audience for their video by inviting people to talk about what they were seeing" (Preston, 2011).<ahref="#fnref7">↩</a></p></li><liid="fn8"><p>The Nazi party had the economic capability to use advanced technology for propaganda. Later on, these technologies became more accessible and used by protesters, anarchists and leftist groups to declare presence and being heard in private and public spaces of the city, resisting the dominant voice of the s
