Submitted a photo essay to a ‘real’ academic journal. They didn’t want it so, heh I’ll publish it in my own publication:

Text here ::

‘2012’ is an event, a brand, a spectacle, a geographical space, a cultural and media practice, a political and economic assemblage. As “Big Build”, “London 2012” or “legacy”, ‘2012’ is a panoply of human and unhuman, material and virtual, real and imaginary objects: athletes and activists; journalists and websites; sponsors and contracts; TV rights and logos; ideologies of ‘participation’ and ‘regeneration’; Siberian pine velodrome planks and toxic chemicals; database algorithms and surveillance drones… and photographs.

‘2012’ is, in part, being built and imagined online. There are the official images but also the distributed montage of photographs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Instagram images; those taken as the East End has been transformed and those which will form part of the documenting of the Games and its legacy.

The JPEG protocol is one of the software and imaging actants (as Bruno Latour would call them) in play in that imagining of ‘2012’. As the most popular codec for photographs online, the standard that underpins the 300,000 photographs uploaded every second to Facebook’s Timelines (Beaver 2008), it enables searches, geotagging, embedding and viewing of the images or imaginings (what we might call ‘imag(in)ings’) in browsers, apps and mashups: the social imag(in)ing of 2012.

The images on the following pages are part of a practice-research project exploring that protocol and the imag(in)ing of 2012. My project uses the object-oriented philosophy (OOP) of Graham Harman (2011) as a way of both understanding that assemblage and imaginary and as an impetus to new imaging.

In brief, OOP holds that all objects – whether real or virtual, human or unhuman – have an equal ontological position. They are all equally present and actual. Further, they have different dimensions. In a Heideggarian sense they withdraw – we can never access their full reality, there is always more. As with Heidegger’s famous hammer, an object’s reality remains hidden until something goes wrong and it breaks, suddenly emerging into consciousness. In a Husserlian sense they have a sensual dimension that we encounter as different instantiations or a myriad of qualities accessible in particular moments and spaces. The JPEG protocol slips out of reach. All we ever encounter are its instantiations as it encodes dot jpg files.

My project understands the distributed web of imag(in)ings on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and the infinite acrhives of Google’s cache as a mesh (as Timothy Morton calls it (2010)) of objects connecting and reconnecting in a myriad of ways. The images, the things they capture, the photographer, her camera’s CCD, the software, the server on which the image sits, the browser that understands that data, the social network’s business strategy… are all objects. They connect and reconnect, forming new objects (the ‘Photo Stream’, the ‘data-open-to-datamining’, the ‘archive’, ‘2012’).

As well as offering a way of understanding distributed imag(in)ing networks, computational assemblages and cultures, OOP offers a way of approaching practice. What I am calling ‘object-oriented photography’ (OOPh) looks to imag(in)e with a flat ontology (a ‘democracy’ as Levi Bryant calls it (2011c)) of object-actants. Here the objects in front of the lens, behind the lens and within the camera, as well as in the wider computational, scopic assemblage are all in play within the photography. The JPEG protocol, myself as photographer, the silicon in the chip, the WiFi router, browser, Facebook’s server farm as well as the 2012 Fence I photograph are all complex, multi-faceted objects connecting and reconnecting within new objects for Facebook to datamine, Google to map, the State to surveil and you to share. The photographs themselves are only one object in that assemblage.

I look to photograph with and through that mesh. In concrete terms, following Jane Bennett’s call to pay attention to ‘Vibrant Matter’ (2010), I photograph objects around the Fence that still surrounds the Olympic site in East London. Litter, laminated notices, workmen’s gloves, cable ties, the mooring rings on the canal from a previous industrial era, plants enfolded with the wire… any object. Part of the liminal spaces of 2012. These are not merely ‘representations’ of ‘2012’. They are active players with an ‘agentic capacity’. They have a materiality. The molecules in the glove react with those of the Fence. The concrete has a carbon footprint. That materiality is part of 2012’s presence in the East End and its purported legacy. Just as my digital image-data has a materiality and a carbon footprint as it exists on server farms and an agentic capacity as it circulates and collides with other data on mobile networks.

As well as 2012 objects, I look to include 2012 imaging objects. The pinhole allows a direct connection between the photons that cross the Fence – that had an existence before the bid was won and will have a presence long after legacy has been forgotten – with the sensor and camera hardware. Similarly, by handholding a digital pinhole camera I created, I make my own object-presence apparent. The images carry the trace of my (human-object) breathing.

The images are presented as pairs. As I photographed, I set my camera to encode the light hitting the CCD using two protocols simultaneously: JPEG and RAW. The same light-as-data was encoded in two forms, creating two image files – a dot jpg file and a dot orf file (the RAW format used by my Olympus camera). When it came to laying out the images whether online or in print, other software actants (PDF, Word, InDesign, HTML) could connect with the .jpg file but not the .orf file. One could be laid out or visible, one could not. By encoding the light-as-data through the two protocols simultaneously and presenting the results of those encodings side-by-side, I explore the relative powers of the protocol object-actants. One (JPEG) makes my light-as-data-as-imag(ining)e visible, social and shareable. The other (RAW) makes the same light-as-data-as-imag(ining)e unvisible, proprietary and discrete.

• Beaver, D 2008, 10 billion photos, facebook.com. Retrieved October 18, 2011,  from https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=30695603919
• Bennett, J., 2010, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things, Duke University Press, Durham.
• Bryant, L.R., 2011, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press. Retrieved October 18, 2011, from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ohp;idno=9750134.0001.001
• Harman, G., 2011, The Quadruple Object, Zero Books, Ropley.
• Morton, T., 2010, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.; London.

And the designed version with the pix (as a PDF) here ::

Imag(in)ing 2012

As you may know, I’m engaging in a bit of my practice-research around object-oriented photography and publishing on/in/through Facebook. Using my favourite new camera (the screengrab facility on my phone), I’m ‘taking’ photos of the images in the Haystack, uploading them back into the space (where they JPEG-encoded as visible images). I’m (re)mixing these with OOPh images of material objects connecting and reconnecting in the molten core of objects located in the flat ontological mesh that Harman, Morton, Bryant and Bogost speak of. These works (as well as other non-Facebook practice-research experiments) are my photographic/media/publishing version of what Ian Bogost calls carpentry, crafting things as a philosophical practice. For Bogost that is software, games etc – Cow Clicker being only the most famous. In ‘carpentry’-based practice -research, the artefact is not illustration or even simply source material for philosophical musing or critique. Rather it is the site of that musing or research. In my case, my ‘experiments’, artifacts, works are where I (or anyone else) finds out about the workings of JPEG and distributed imag(in)ing.

Anyway, when I saw that on New Year’s Day 2012 that copyright on James Joyce’s work ended, I decided to carve out another work. Following Ken Goldsmith’s idea of ‘uncreative writing‘ which he explores in his new book (which I’d just finished – of courses as an eText!), I decided to (re)wrte Finnegans Wake on Twitter and Facebook, 140 characters at a time. Because I’m particularly interested in Facebook’s new Timeline, I decided to work with that new time-space and write it backwards. One day I (and you)’ll be able to look at my Timeline (NB not Twitter page because they will have fallen into Twitter’s non-space, although they will be archived/republished here) – and read from “riverrun, past Eve and Af=dam’s, from swerve of shore” and on. A few rules:

• Each passage must be 140 characters exactly even if that means splitting a word.
• Each passage must be 140 characters including any space at the beginning or end.
• Each passage must be copied and pasted from the Web to the Web.

A few initial ‘findings’:

1. One friend on Facebook spotted what I was doing:

But of course to open up the experiment to other ‘writers’, not that I could stop them, would be to reverse the Timeline. Here carpentry/practice-research opens up issues of Facebook’s logic, software objects and reworking of time and space.

2. As the work moves forward (or backward) on Facebook and Twitter, Finnegans Wake (or maybe Finnegans Wake’ [single quote being the Maths symbol for not-negation]), the passages will become entangled with other Facebook/Twitter objects – photos, links, friends’ news etc. Here carpentry/practice-research opens up the object-oriented nature of distributed media and media spaces as well as the sensual/real splits and the vicarious causation apparent as objects connect with other objects within the heart of the Timeline object, the Facebook database objects, the Social Graph object.

I’m interested in how Facebook and Twitter work (and can be used) as publishing as well as research spaces. The best way to explore what Facebook ‘does’ to our ideas of content, stories, images, creativity, media is to use it. The best way to research it as object space is to connects some objects with it and through it. I would argue that carpentry/practice-research opens up more questions, issues, ideas and frameworks – as well, to my mind, demonstrating the power and reach of OOO – than attempting to stand outside (as a Subject rather than object) and figure out the connections, references and allusions… hence my choice of Finnegans Wake.

STOP PRESS:

Another thing I just noticed. When I post a fragment on Facebook or Twitter that has a space at the beginning, the software corrects it for me.

STOP PRESS 13.01.12

Wonderful Pingback on this post. Scraped into site on ‘Carpentry’. You gotta love algorithm’s sense of humour!