DramaLit Blog 1.0: BU School of Theatre

The Urban Speaker

The Urban Speaker was a public art instillation in Tompkins Square Park in New York City  in October of 2010. The peice was conceived and built by Carlos J. Gomez. In installing the Urban Speaker, Gomez hoped to explore “… the possibilities of urban media spaces created by the introduction of telecommunication and interactive technologies into our built environments.”

It just sort of looked like a traffic sign, but it was much more. The Urban Speaker contained inside it a smartphone which could be dialed, would answer, and then broadcast your words to Tompkins Square park via a giant loudspeaker at the top of the contraption. A sign on the Urban Speaker read: Call 979-997-3041 to speak in public.

The smart phone inside the machine would answer a caller with an outgoing message that, among other things, instructed the caller to “free your mind” and “break free from the system.” The caller would then have exactly 60 seconds to leave their message, to broadcast their one important thing to the world. 60 seconds for anyone in the entire world to deliver their personal manifesto to the masses, or to no one at all. It just depended on the traffic pattern.

I found particular resonance in Gomez’s exploration in regards to my recent work in Directing and Theatre Ensemble. I’ve been assigned to Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and I’ve been thinking a lot about our attempts to grasp at intimate human connection through something as stark as technology. In his Instillation, Gomez has juxtaposed and forced the intimacy of having only 60 seconds to share what is most important to you, with the fact that the words you say will not only be transmitted through a machine, but perhaps (depending on your location) hundreds of miles away, falling on the ears of people you will never know or see. Gomez has brought a theatrical experience to the public. An actor (hopefully) ascends the stage to give deeply of themselves and make themselves vulnerable to the audience. It is likely that an actor will not know everyone they give these pieces of themselves away to, and yet they do it because they believe it to be important. I commend Gomez for enabling the public to experience the same surreal urgency, and to let go of words so freely.

You can hear some of their words memorialized (and find more information about Gomez’s work) here.

I called the Urban Speaker, even though I knew that the installation had already been removed. To my surprise, however, there was an outgoing message saying that the Urban Speaker would be closed until further notice.

To my delight, the message inbox was full.