The idea of the ‘network’ is an important one for discussions of the new scopic regime that I argue is being set in motion by actants including the jpeg protocol. Whether it is used with or without the definite article, singular or plural, capitalised or not, the concept is an active force in most, if …
Category Archives: objects
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 …
Protocols, objects and exceptional topologies
If we are to follow the likes of Anna Munster and Geert Lovink in problematising the concept of the network as a unified or stable object, then perhaps we need a different point of view. As they put it: “the very notion of a network is in conflict with the desire to gain an overview” …
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