iPhone phonography app
The PhonoCam app allows an iPhone photographer to record a snatch of audio before the image is captured. The developer says:
“PhonoCam -Record an ambient image.
PhonoCam is a camera application which records sounds from the environment together with a photograph.It records audio for a set amount of time (between 2 seconds to unlimited) until the photograph is captured. After copying files to iTunes via Wi-Fi, images are displayed as album cover artwork and can be browsed together with sounds using iTunes CoverFlow.”
Phonography can be addressed as a ‘way of seeing’, with sound providing the images or the s(t)imulation that generates the images. Lothar Baumgarten’s Seven Sounds/Seven Circles ‘performed/displayed’ at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in April/June 2009 features what he calls ‘phonic images’ 1 where because of the binaural recording, “with headphones especially, one will experience an unusually rich life-lied sound panorama” 2.
This use of visual language to position sound can be seen as part of the struggle between scopic and sonic regimes or perhaps more productively as an emerging hybrid ‘way of experiencing’ partly enabled by portable media technologies.
The PhonoCam app can be seen as part of the same emergence but in terms of production. This is not video nor stills nor even phonography, it is a mobilised (in)decisive moment practicesomewhere in the spaces between. It is also worth noting that the sound precedes the image taking. It leads up sonically to a scopic climax.
As a sidenote, when I checked Baumgarten’s Book/CD on Amazon, the site asked me to help classify the work:
“Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product. Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite [sic] items.”
I have tagged this fragment but only within the context of this project. Folksonomy always has the problem of multiple language practices and nowhere more than when faced with multiple media-language practices.
