THE IPOD TOUCH MANIFESTO: APPROACHING POST-SUBJECT PHOTOGRAPHY

2021

 “Nine months ago I purchased a 4th generation iPod Touch for $19.59,
and have since used the device exclusively to photograph. This iteration of the iPod was released in 2010, and was the first iPod Touch model to feature a camera application. The device is small. Its presence in my hand does not cross the border of my palm. Interaction with the iPod is primarily mediated through its 3.5 inch touch screen, and the few tactile buttons which do appear (home and powerbutton, volume rocker) are jarringly one dimensional in their functionality. Far from its commercial prime, the device now serves as an early model of the universal machines of today. It was once an all-in-one device, but the definition of “all” has since expanded beyond the iPod’s capabilities.

To fixate on the iPod as a camera is to single point audit its efficacy as a universal machine, forcing the acknowledgement of the vast divide between what the object claims to be and what it truly is. Vierkant describes the material conditions of the Post-Internet, where interconnectivity is an assumed banality, as an age where “nothing is in a fixed state: i.e.everything is anything else.” Comparing the iPod camera with any traditional notion of a camera, in any capacity (be it the experience of photographing or the images produced), reveals that not only is everything anything else, but something else entirely.”