‚Sound and Public Space‘– Our symposium in Tallinn, Part I
Last week – some of you might have seen that on Facebook – we had a symposium on sound and public space in Tallinn. Our speakers were journalists, artists, innovation designers and sound architects who presented a wide variety of their projects.
While we don’t want to bore you with long accounts of what was said, we would very much like to show you some of the work that was shown to us.
The journalist, radio broadcaster and politician Rimantas Pleikys from Lithuania formally introduced us to the topic of ‘Radio Jamming’ – a practice widely spread during the times of the Cold War in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Germany, Poland, Bulgaria and many more. These countries developed specific ‘jamming stations’ in order to prevent certain radio programs from being transmitted in their countries. This applied to programs by the BBC, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and the Voice of Israel to name just a few. The practice of radio censorship by jamming is still in use today in Cuba, North Korea and China for example.
- Rimantas Pleikys
Pleikys showed us the documentary ‘Empire of Noise’ based on his book about radio jamming in which he used many sound samples of what this jamming sounded like. In his words: ‘We listened to the jamming for fifty years, now you listen to it for fifty minutes!’ We highly recommend you check out the full documentary below:
After Rimantas Pleikys we met the ‘Unsworn Industries’ – namely Erik and Magnus – from Malmo/Sweden. They are an interaction design and innovation studio who developed a series of projects called ‘Unsworn Telecom’. If you are unsure of what exactly their profession is (as we were) they are exactly that: interaction designers. They presented five projects and we would like to let you in on the two whose interactive aspects we liked most: the ‘Ophones’ and the ‘Telemegaphone Dale’.
- Magnus Torstensson
- Erik Sandelin
The ‘Ophones’ are loudspeakers ‘with an attached telephone receiver. When an ophonist has recorded a sound into an ophone, it is repeated infinitely until another sound is recorded into the same ophone.’ What people made of it? Have a look for yourself:
four ophones trailer from Unsworn Industries on Vimeo.
The second project they presented was the Telemegaphone Dale, ‘a seven-metres tall loudspeaker sculpture on top of the Bergskletten mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway. Anyone can dial the Telemegaphone´s phone number and have the sound of their voice projected out across the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale.’
Sounds great? Sounds annoying? Have a look at their Telemegaphone trailer before you decide!
This was the first part of the symposium and afterwards some coffee was needed. What happened in the second part is our blog post for next week so make sure to come back!
Not to forget: what do you think about the projects? What do you think about these speakers? We would love to hear your opinion! (And if you have suggestions for other speakers and projects you think should have been there, definitely let us know in the comment section below!)
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