Adrain Mackenzie’s subject is ‘wirelessness’, the assemblage of practices, forces, ecologies and affects set in motion by Wi-Fi’s technical and cultural workings. He defines it as “an experience trending toward entanglements with things, objects, gadgets, infrastructures and service, and imbued with indistinct sensations and practices of network-associated change”(Mackenzie 2010: 5). His reading of William James …
Category Archives: objects
Adding scales to our eyes
Discussing the operations of protocol leads inexorably to the issue of ‘depth’. It is tempting to talk of protocols as the building blocks for software or software relations, to speak of different levels within software architectures or within analysis. Galloway for instance talks of the four nested layers of the Internet suite (2004: 39), themselves …
The codec moment: raise the standard high
Outside the technical literature there has been little study of the protocols and standards that run through software and hence media ecologies, digital assemblages and information spaces. Even within software studies, the emphasis has been on software packages, whether business (Fuller 2003a), games (Galloway 2006, WardripFruin 2009), artworks (Fuller 2003b, Parikka 2010, Hertz & Parikka …
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Background and foreground
Adrian Mackenzie begins his discussion of wirelesses (Mackenzie 2010) with ‘Wi-Fi’, noting that the trademark caries instructions as to how the logo should appear. The 45 page brand guidelines (PDF) state that the space around the logo should be equal to three times the width of the (lower-case) ‘i’ which, Mackenzie notes: “seems apt. Wireless …
What are we looking at?
As well as providing an interesting area between materiality and immateriality, software occupies an evocative space between the static and dynamic. The forensic examination of protocols, standards and code, from a media archaeological or technical point of view reveals objects that are both static and dynamic. They are specific and definite. The pixel, the algorithm, …
Not just a matter of engineering
In 2006, introducing the Software Studies Workshop at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Matt Fuller said: “In a sense, all intellectual work is now ‘software study’, in that software provides its media and its context, but there are very few places where the specific nature, the materiality, of software is studied except as a matter …