Chatter

Disembodied Voices traces the changing nature of personal and public space, exploring the ways in which the evolution of communications technology has expands the private sphere while eroding the public realm.  The project’s creator, Jody Zellen, argues that telecommunications, particularly cellphones, allow networks of friendship and personal relationships to flourish in new ways and information to spread.  Cellphones represent personal liberation from one’s environment and even–on some levels–political freedom (such as the use of cellphones by dissident groups in North Korea).

Unfortunately, this trend creates a situation in which one’s personal environment is dissociated from one’s immediate, real world, surroundings. The strengthening of private networks appears at the expense of the aural commons.  Cellphone users blather on, unaware and uncaring as one half of their conversion pollutes the space around them:

Cell phone users - increasingly oblivious to their surroundings - remain undaunted by the fact that to anyone nearby, they appear to be carrying on animated monologues, stopping, gesturing and often yelling into empty space, behaving similarly to the street person who they surely would go out of their way to avoid.

To visualize this “translocal experience” and its effects on public life, Disembodied Voices presents a series of swirling chattering icons (filterable by voice and language), which represent the number of people using the site and spout conservation fragments, and an overhead shot of a normal city sidewalk.   The latter allows users to move from person to person, experiencing snippets of conversations and cellphone use that reflect personal atomism.

Zellen’s Disembodied Voices project appeared as an installation at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, which included animations of people cut off from their surroundings by cellphone use and an interactive feature in which visitors used toy phones to cause icons to grow and move in a maelstrom of sound and language.