Concern for the protocol object has been dominated by issues of relationality, processuality and potentiality. This has drawn a picture that can be seen as reductionist insofar as these accounts position digital objects as built on something more basic, as echoes of a deeper reality – in the case of JPEG, a deeper, more fundamental …
Category Archives: #quadJPEG
The digital imaging pipeline and objects
This project seeks to understand and also takes place in the ‘digital imaging pipeline’, that space of objects and object connections within hardware and software scopic apparatuses where light-becomes-date-become-image. Although the term ‘pipeline’ would tend to connote process and movement and linear relations, I will come on to draw it in terms of objects. To …
Relationality, processuality and potentiality
Three intro sections for three longer sections for one chapter for… The relational object For software and critical code studies, locating the digital or code object within a field of relations has been a powerful axiom. As part of a broader hegemonic struggle within media and cultural studies, exploring protocols, interfaces, languages and algorithms as …
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Object-centred and object-oriented
At first sight David M. Berry’s The Philosophy Of Software{Berry 2011} would appear to offer an object-oriented account of software objects. After all, Berry draws on Bruno Latour’’s ‘philosophy’1 to argue for an account of power-full code actant-objects. “Code is striking in its ability to act as both an actor performing actions upon data, and …
The codec moment
Aside from Galloway’s discussion of TCP/IP and DNS, the explorations of the software object has not really addressed the specificity of protocol. Although Joel Slayton, in the forward to Fuller’s Media Ecologies, talks of “the limits and excess of protocol”{Fuller 2007@ix} as a theme of the text, the book uses artworks and pirate radio as …
An anomalous look at anomalous objects
Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson’s account of “anomalous objects”{%Parikka 2009a} provides a similar bringing together of the three themes. Here the digital objects under investigation are addressed through their relations, as process more than essence and as harbouring a potential that media archaeology serves to trace. Parikka and Sampson use the term ‘topology’ to …