2 Cases of Phonography art (?)

by lawrence

There are a lot of people doing phonography / field-recording around the world, most of them carry their recording gears wherever they go in order to escape from the potential impulse of committing suicide in case an epiphanic aural moment slips under their noses. However, this kind of labourious dedication doesn’t always promise remarkable end product. As the following two instances demonstrate, the best phonography works, more often than not, are the result of blind chance.

The first piece is probably already very familiar for some, it’s a video footage captured by someone with a cellphone camera on a double-deck bus in Hong Kong. The six-minute video features a apparently high-pressured middle-aged uncle and a twenty-something lad (later it turned out his name is Alvin). To put it simple: Alvin tapped the uncle on the shoulder suggesting that the latter restricts his volume when talking into cellphone, only to find himself inducing a series of scolding and obscenities. The event and its spin-offs were well-documented in English by Roland Soong of ESWN here. And here is the video (via YouTube, with Chinese and English subtitles).

The video also reminds Hong Kong netizens of another public notoriety, captured only as audio file this time. It’s the recording of a complain phone call session between a guy named Alan Ho and two female operators at The Airport Authority Hong Kong. This is an interesting case of phonography work not only for its content, but also its structure. A Wiki-style document of the event can be viewed here (in Chinese only). Click here to download the recording (MP3 format).

Question: Are these phonography art?




5 Comments »

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  1. superb!!!

    Comment by Wenhua — May 27, 2006 #

  2. Even though these two pieces (the “Bus Uncle” video clip, and the “Alan Ho Incident” audio recording) are no doubt wonderful “works,” it should be clarified at once that not both of them are “phonography” works. The second one, the Alan Ho audio clip, is a piece of phonography work, while the other is not.

    Video recordings of live events, regardless of the presence of sound, are not phonography by definition (”phono” = sound). But what truly matters is not the issue of definition of terms, but artistic (?) power. The very value and intrigue of phonography “works” lies in its acousmatic nature, i.e., their lack of visual correspondence. Many phonography (audio only) recordings are in fact superior to a video (visaul + audio) recording of the same events, because of the sense of mystery and suspense, and not unknowing what is going to happen at all.

    The Alan Ho recording is a case in point (though not the best example). Imagzine the entire Alan Ho incident captured in a video file. The resulting impact would have been totally different. A much better example would be your (Lawrence Li’s) own “Minibus Pimps” (from 1999, collected in the compilation,”China: the Sonic Avant-Garde” released on Post-Concrete), the powerful effect of which would have been completely lost if it had been a video recording.

    Comment by Dajuin — May 27, 2006 #

  3. The ‘bus uncle’ capture isn’t presented as a phonographic work - that doesn’t mean it isn’t one.

    I have a pleasant memory of seeing a group of Papua New Guinean highlanders (on television - I’ve never been to PNG) in full ceremonial garb, complete with bird of paradise feathers in their wigs and boars’ tusks through their septums, one of whom was wearing a broken vinyl LP as a breastplate. There’s a moment in the movie “Brother from another Planet” in which the protagonist throws away an LP just to keep the cover photo.

    These are simply memories, not presented as analogies (even poor ones), so they aren’t, because I say so.

    Not everything a photographer sees are photographs, but the latter can still be recognized in the former - although the only value and intrigue to the photographer would certainly be the photos lack of correspondence to the smells, sounds, temperature, etc. of the original event, again, because I say so, and I should know.

    In closing, I would like to add that the only value and intrigue to these words consists of their lack of narrative correspondence to, well, pretty much anything. Tuna, spleen, lies, damn lies.

    yours acousmatically,

    Comment by Du Yisa — May 27, 2006 #

  4. This Du Yisa guy obviously has no clue. He wouldn’t know an analogy if it beat him on his bare ass with a frozen fish.

    For me, the artistic (?) power of the written word lies in its lack of correspondence to any form of imagery - it is purely marks on paper, action paintings by Pollock, white paintings by Rauschenberg, without referent. The world unfolds one moment at a time, endlessly surprising, just as your eyes scroll across this set of pixels, which are, of course, inherently formless and therefore devoid of narrative structure. Have you seen any original works by Seurat? The man knew colors like snails know snot.

    Yes, Big L, I do read your blog. Oh, and I also liked “Minibus Pimps”, but you already knew that.

    Comment by Yitzchak Dumiel — May 28, 2006 #

  5. The argument that ‘Bus Uncle’is not a phonographic work because it contains video data is the logical equivalent of stating that it is not a videographic work because it contains audio data (after all, ‘video’ means ’see’). These two data streams were captured in tandem, but by entirely different devices attached to the same apparatus.

    If the clip were shown to a roomfull of visually impaired people, would it still be videographic? Although I completely agree with Dajuin that video information can influence an auditory experience, I don’t think we can draw boundaries quite so neatly between genres. In the case of ‘bus uncle’, both the method of capture and presentation (as-is) seem to me to be consistent with phonography. However, I doubt the recordist in this case was actively pursuing the abstract compositional paramaters of the auditory capture. This is something that Lawrence noticed, and brought to public attention. Can we say it’s not phonographic simply because the recordist didn’t intend the audio as an independent work? Is intent really the decisive criterion in this case?

    Just some random thoughts. Must go now…..

    yours
    Zhanglang

    Comment by Zhang Lang — May 28, 2006 #

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