# Multiplication Vis a Vis Amplification
Collective voice affords the amplification and multiplication either with the aid of technology or embodied practices.
## The mediation of voice through multiplication
Saskia Sassen (2012, p.) 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 her this condition reveals another type of politics and political actors, based on hybrid contexts of acting and outside of the formal system. Kanaveli (2012) says that something that is visible and can be heard is reality and can create power. 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. This brings the conversation to the Speaker's Corner, "the home of free speech, where anyone can get on their soapbox and make their voice heard" (Coomes, 2015). This practice was very crucial in Occupy Movement [1](#myfootnote1). Anyone could be a speaker and be heard by the people surrounding her/him. In the Occupy Wall Street, amplified sound devices, like microphone and megaphone, were not permitted in the city and the crowd could bot listen clearly to the speaker [1](#myfootnote2). But "when the technologies above them are removed somehow, the foundational elements remain embedded and embodied in our cyborg bodies and brains" (Pages, 2011). The participants of #occupy used the 'human microphone', as they call it. This means that the crowd would repeat the words of the speaker for the benefit of those located in the rear. There the voice played an important role in the spreading of the speech to the farest points of the public space. "Even given that many of the participants of #occupy are in full possession of smartphones, verbal address to the crowd from a singular source is still important" (Pages, 2011). This is an interesting fact of the public space of today. Even though many new technologies exist the public space seems to exist in a more primitive face to face communication and bodily expression under the context of public assemblies.
From my point of view, the Occupy Movement revealed a lot about the relation of the media technology with the presence and resistance, emerged as an amplified process, in public. What I find interesting is that those people because of their multilayered relation to technology are able to spread the words and make them viral in internet. This process is also a way to archive and make public bottom-up initiatives in public spaces. At the same time there is a temporarity in this action as platforms in internet are constantly changing or disappearing. So, the events and speeches are appearing in fragments of videos, transcriptions, conversations in forums. It is more like the users, protesters are leaving traces online as many as possible. As it can be seen from the Youtube videos of the Occupy Movements the crowd is using a lot of different media technologies, like their smartphones, to record or stream the words of the public speakers.
*The female collective voice (thrinos)?*
gossiping -- baton effect
## The mediation of voice through amplification
According to Hanna Arendt the speech becomes possible with the existence of a group of people. Suffragettes' speech-making workshops was a way to provide women with tools “with which to take their concerns out into the public domain” (Rose Gibbs, 2016). Speech was a civilized way to respond to violence happening inside homes. Feminists focused on the voice because there is a uniqueness in it, that embodies the speaker when entering a dialogue. It is an approach that rejects the abstract and bodiless universal identity of one's person, that has been developed by the western thought. By that identity I mean one person is represented as a universal entity that shares the same characteristics and problems with all the people. So this person can be represented in a conversation concerning her/his body. But according to them each person is unique and carries personal and situated problems and principles. Even more, the voice through speech- that can take the form of songs passing from the one person to the other or the collective voice of protesting- links one another and at the same time keeps the individuality of the speaker. In contrast to mainstream political spheres the feminists, like anarchists, were looking for horizontal ways of communication were no voice was dominating over others. Listening everyone, even the most shy ones, is a basic element of this kind of practices.
### Radio amplification-multiplication
In the examples of radio art and pirate radio activism the temporariness and site-specificity of these actions- of prohibition, sharing of knowledge and communicating through voice, amplification of voices- were tangled with the materiality and specificity of the medium....(hit and run actions)
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. Kanouse 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. (More on THe oxymoron)
She brings the example of a project, called Talking Homes by John Brumit, that 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 re-framed clearer the struggle for the neighborhood than the big radio programs. 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 that she talks about 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. 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, on-line and electromagnetic realm. The DIY electronic media empowers the individual and collective voice.
*cars together playing the same frequency https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=28&v=GC8MIa98f-E, https://www.a-n.co.uk/events/temporary-local-broadcast/
max neuhaus people broadcasting different frequencies that compose a piece.*
##Conclusion
### The collective voice vis a vis multiplication and amplification
*of amplification and examples of amplification in feminist movements*
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplification
### Second orality_
The ‘secondary orality’. “At 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, pg.13)
Parallel or multiple presences in other places. “Radio and television have brought major political figures as public speakers to a larger public than was ever possible before modern electronic developments. Thus in a sense orality has come into its own more than ever before.” (Ong, pg. 135). Describing further with examples of media [radio, telephone, Skype, voice messages] that spread the voice in private or public spheres. Being here now and elsewhere. "Heidegger, in Being and Time and elsewhere,", "To the extent that it always relates us to the absent other, the telephone"(Telephone Book, Ronell)
#Notes
1: It is an international movement since 2011 for social and economic justice and new forms of democracy with meetings in public spaces
2: "In NYC, a sound permit is required in order to use these devices in public, and the police may, or may not grant the permit" (NewYorkRawVideos, 2011, note)
# Bibliography
- Benjamin, W. (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 01 edition. Translated by J. A. Underwood. London: Penguin.
- ‘Φύλο, φόβος και δημόσιος λόγος - Βαβυλωνία | Πολιτικό Περιοδικό’ (2012) Βαβυλωνία, 25 February. Available at: https://www.babylonia.gr/2012/02/25/filo-fovos-ke-dimosios-logos/ (Accessed: 26 November 2018).
- radio in chiasme