My project proposal was about the intervention of data practices from Google, Facebook, Amazon... into our communication systems and all the human labor happening behind it. I made an annotated diagram that explains that from my perspective. So for example,....(explain one route with listening and transcribing)
I wanted to highlight the human involvement into the training of speech recognition software on which personal assistants are based on. And the importance of voice as a unique element of our bodies that is collected into a big pool of trained data. My aim was to make experiments with other people in group sessions where we would discuss about our privacy and at the same time the discussion would become input for a process of activities. Like transcribing, listening, eavesdropping, speaking, recording, repeating. They would immitate the processes of the training of speech recognition tools. Here is a diagram made by somebody else that explains further the exploitation of user's speech data and the free labor for the Amazon echo.
Besides their commercial use these tools are also used by the states to control citizens or the access of refugees in the country. For example Germany wants to use speech analysis tools to verify the claims of origin of refugees. So they collect their voice data through interviews and if the tool finds out that their dialect is not related to their claims of origin then they are banned by asking asylum.
My purpose was to strengthen our awareness for our involvement in the loop and answer in some questions that bother me. Some of these questions is how our bodies are influenced by these systems, what is the control over them, what are the new relation with our voices and how can we appropriate these new technologies more consciously, what new material and tools these experiments produce? It seems to me that the communication platforms are estranged[3] realities where the personal body [cultural, physical, political, gender] disappears realities difficult to understand. I would try first an example at Leeszaal where the visitors and the volunteers are permanent inhabitants of Netherlands and are coming from different countries. I assume that they have different relations to these tools. For example, some people donate their voice to speech recognition tools, others use personal assistants ...
I organised a workshop, part of the pyratechnic sessions, with the first years. I wanted to immitate a loop in which a conversation of two people leakes out to another room, through Jitsi, where participants repeat, transcribe and then read the transcription back to them. So their words come back distorted. //Explain the second diagram//
The workshop was missing content and after the feedback I got from the participants and the outcome of it I started looking for transcriptions and distribution of public speeches and that led me on my interest on the voice and the body in public.
So I started to focus my research on voice in public, public speeches and assemblies with the aid of media. I looked at specific examples of counter communication that I had come accross in a previous research.
My project proposal is about public speeches and their mediation through live streaming technologies. I am very interested in the voice and its ability to connect people but also to express the uniqueness of the speaker. In feminists movements speech-making workshops were helping women to express the violence in their home (private space) to the public domain that was dominated by male voices. They were privatizing listening and horizontal communication. The presence of them in public was very important. I must say that Greece isn't very far away from that gender/social division between private and public spaces. And this is what I want to practice and think on.
In occupy movements respectively speech and voice played an important role. It was not allowed to use amplifying devices in the public space so the crowd became the "human microphone", repeating what the speaker says. Youtube and live streaming was used for the fast communication of the public assemblies in internet and were perfectly fitted in the urgency of those actions. I see streaming as a bottom-up approach for establishing rapid (though temporary) communication. Similarly radio activists were broadcasting community radio shows or spreading political speeches legally or illegally.
So right now I am planning to organize workshops that will held conversations on restrictions, gender/social division in public spaces in NL and countries of origin. These conversations will be accompanied by the use of streaming technology and activities of mediation that include the body (like human microphone, transcription, speech-making).
medium: live streaming, transcibing, human microphone, internet
tools: live streaming, pad, open source tools
license:
Create public:
how: workshops with inhabitants (daily expression in rotterdam public) and experiments in public spaces, connect with people and communities around patebin, live streaming
why: occupy public space and the contribution of media, externilize the private the need for presence for democratic processes to happen, the conflict with the powerful.
Liveness that the medium provides and engagement with the technology
intentions: division and exclusion in private and public,
Way of approach:
experiments with the tools and practices without the content
