Belay: 23 January 2011 (For other belay points and the idea behind them, see here). I am looking at a way of accounting for 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’ – a …
Author Archives: praxis
Dragging philosophy down
Mine is not a PhD about philosophy but it is a philosophical PhD. It is not a discussion of ontology or even a defence or exploration of object-oriented philosophy (OOP). I would also hope it not simply a bland application of a philosophical framework to a media problematic. I will argue that offers a number …
My practice is a failure
Software studies has a long tradition of seeing the value of practice. Lev Manovich says: “it helps to practice what one writes about” (2008: 8). Matthew Fuller as editor of the Software Studies Lexicon makes clear that “one rule of thumb for the production of this book is that the contributors had to be involved …
Clear to see… or imag(in)e
Just because the jpeg protocol withdraws from sight, that its role is to build alliances within software and between software and imag(in)ing practices as well as between media and web business and strategies, doesn’t mean that it can’t be understood, imag(in)ed perhaps, as an object. Object-oriented philosophy allows us to account for the ontology of …
An absent presence
Jpeg operates at different scales. As an object it has an ontological status which object-oriented approaches see as equivalent to any other object in a network but which other approaches could address as material, powerful, ideological, structural, textual or discursive. Obviously an object oriented approach would not rule out these frameworks, indeed it argues that …
Tracing an image: chasing protocol
It began, as so many media journeys do, with a search. I Googled “2012 olympics factory” and clicked on the image tab to be presented with a mosaic of imag(in)ings, some from Flickr, some from Blogs and some from news organisations. I screengrabbed the page (which was compressed and encoded as an image file by …