Jpeg withdraws from view. Just as one gets near to its working, it slips away. In my “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” jpeg is folded within the camera’s software, encoding light as data and leaving its traces indelibly in particular images and imaginings and enabling certain practices. It is enfolded in the structural relations of the imag(in)ing …
Author Archives: praxis
Kittler: burnt into hardware
Kittler rises to Lev Manovich’s challenge: “if we are to focus on software itself […] it helps to practice what one writes about” (Manovich 2008: 8). Kittler not only knows about software, he has taught it and advocates programming as a practice (Kittler 1995, 2008). What is perhaps interesting is how he approaches software less …
Kittler: discourse on discourse channel conditions and Pink Floyd
Geoffrey Winthrop Young characterises Kittler’s later work as a shift to dealing with “technological” as opposed to a “communication” medium. “Writing operates by way of a symbolic grid which requires that all ‘data pass through the bottleneck of the signifier’ 9Kittler 1999: 4), whereas phono-, photo- and cinematographic analog media process physical effects of the …
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Belay: 15 February 2011
Belay: 15 February 2011 (For other belays and the idea behind them, see here). I am exploring the relationship between the jpeg compression protocol and the new photographic and imaging practices of sharing, publishing, streaming, archiving and remixing online, by understanding jpeg as a ‘scopic apparatus’ within a “digital imag(in)ing pipeline”. My aim is to …
Kittler: early, late but always media
For Friedrich Kittler too, the “subject’ is a core concern. This is obviously apparent in Discourse Networks, 1800-1900 (1990) where he draws connections between pedagogical techniques and the mergence of the modern subject through a merger between Foucauldian archaeology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. For early Kittler biopower was at the heart of the discourse networks he …
Friedberg: metaphor and materiality
For Anne Friedberg, the frame is more than a metaphor. Although she starts The Virtual Window: From Alberti To Microsoft with “Alberti’s window metaphor” (2006: 12), and then goes on to discuss Windows and “the window”, she is looking to do more than simply show how Microsoft’s engineers and marketing teams used the metaphor to position …