Abstracted objects: creating the soundscapes of Gezi Park

Date

2014-05-16

Author

Tuncel, Yunus
Kaygan, Harun

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During the recent protest rallies (in Gezi Park, Wall Street, and elsewhere) sound assumed a major role by creating unique soundscapes, not only in the squares where the demonstrations took place, but also in neighborhoods. The objects that are supposed to be kept at home, such as pots and pans or whistles, revolted and flowed out onto the streets to join car horns and slogans. One way to learn from these objects is to see them in terms of “abstractions”, to borrow a term from phonography. The sounds of these objects are “abstracted” from their normal uses in the private sphere and appropriated into the public sphere to provide a basis where they challenged the dominant soundscape and the web of meanings. The aim of this paper is to look at product sound from a new novel perspective, underlining its social and political uses as part of design activism. For this purpose, examples are given from the Gezi and Occupy protests, interviews are conducted with people who closely followed the Gezi protests, and the concept of “abstraction” is elaborated as a key term that makes it possible to talk about appropriations of products as noise making devices in protests.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/86298

Conference Name

5T: Resistance with/in/to Design, 5 - 16 Mayıs 2014

Collections

Department of Architecture, Conference / Seminar

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Citation Formats

Y. Tuncel and H. Kaygan, “Abstracted objects: creating the soundscapes of Gezi Park,” İzmir, Türkiye, 2014, p. 106, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/86298.