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 instantiations of software, as a way into the broader techno-social assemblage. The work is at a different scale. Similarly David Berry’s work on open source{%Berry 2004}{%Berry 2005}{%Berry 2008} rather than moving in the direction of the protocols and standards and the legal and cultural battles over their role, ownership and position, has moved in the direction of a broader philosophical critique of the computational society{%Berry 2011}.

JPEG specifically is even more neglected. As Daniel Palmer says: “JPEG is strangely unknown, almost completely neglected in the critical literature around digital photography”{%Palmer 2011}.

There are a few exceptions to this neglect and in many ways these accounts bring together the three themes that I have identified as running through discussions of the digital and scopic object.

Coming from film studies, Sean Cubitt has approached YouTube through the H.263 codec which is enfolded with the Flash video (.flv) format{%Cubitt 2008}. He says: “There is no internet without the standardisation of internet protocols”{%Cubitt 2008@46}. Cubitt picks up on Adrain Mackenzie’s short account of motion imaging codecs in Fuller’s Lexicon{%Mackenzie 2008a} where he argues that “codecs structure contemporary media economies and cultures in important ways… [they] catalyze new relations between people, things, spaces, and times in events and forms” {%Mackenzie 2008a@48}. In particular he draws a connection between video codecs’ ‘transform compression’ and ‘motion estimation’, the technique it uses to compress but also render motion, and a “relational ordering that articulates realities together that previously lay further apart”{%Mackenzie 2008a@54}.^⁠1

Cubitt has continued this interest in standards drawing connections between colour space standards and an emergent 3D scopic regime{%Cubitt 2010}.

While Cubitt’s demand that film studies engage with the codecs and protocols that are now so important to the industry as well as the cultural practices and relations that run through spaces and businesses such as YouTube, is important, those objects remain components, actants in a troupe rather than the focus themselves. H.263 and HSV, LAB and RGB are enfolded with corporate interests (Adobe) and telecoms and non-governmental bodies (ITU, ISO etc). He uses these relations as a way of mapping global and neo-liberal relations and discourses of the public sphere, at the same time rendering those protocol objects as in an almost Latourian fashion, defined by those relations. The determination may be more than one way but the object does not exceed its relations.

At the same time those codecs are drawn as objects exhibiting a form of dynamism, enabling processes of visualisation and imagining as well but also processural in terms of how they work. Here compression protocols average data, codecs reprocess light as particular spectrums of colour. It is this standardised processing that is key to understanding the protocol’s nature and its enfolding with capitalist and technosocial relations. That processuality is articulated through becoming, a potential ‘within’ the standard. H.261harbours the potential to encode data as well as drive YouTube as social space, journalism and business. As it is repositioned within new relations it is actualised as citizen-media tool, as part of an Apple-Adobe IP battle or as component in a video on demand business plan.

While both Cubitt and Mackenzie have certainly engaged with protocols they have arguably not approached those codecs and standards as specific objects requiring an account of their position and nature as objects. Rather they have been addressed as components in a computation, visual or techno-social assemblage. They are defined and positioned by their relations with other objects. Just as Galloway positions TCP/IP in terms of its relation (as rules) to control societies, so Mackenzie locates wireless standards in terms of broader fields of experience and Cubitt draws colour space standards as elements in a politically and economically charged scopic field and the history of the “standard observer”. It is this relational account of objects that I look to move beyond.

Specifically in terms of JPEG, Palmer argues that: “the JPEG format^⁠2 is part of the new computational logic of photography”{%Palmer 2011}. For Palmer, JPEG needs to be approached as a rhetorical form. Following Manovich’s linguistic turn, Palmer traces the ideological workings of JPEG as a matter of coding with JPEG a powerful component in the processes of encoding at play in digital imaging. While Palmer’s highlighting of JPEG’s position within imaging is important, I look to an object-oriented focus on the object itself not its rhetorical or linguistic workings as a way into addressing its power.

¹ Fuller’s collection is interesting insofar as the series of very short chapters, all focus on very specific, even technical aspects of ‘software’: whether that is aspects of the user interface – the copy function; import and export; the programme – the code library, the function; or the hardware/software relation – the interrupt or object orientation. Aside from Mackenzie however, the protocols and standards are surprisingly absent.

² Technically of course JPEG is not the format but the protocol that enables the JFIF format.

• Berry, D.M., 2004, The contestation of code, Critical Discourse Studies, 1(1), pp. 65-89.
• Berry, D.M. & Moss, G., 2005, The libre culture manifesto, Free Software Magazine.
• Berry, D.M., 2008, Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics Of Copyleft And Open Source, Pluto Press, London.
• Cubitt 2008, Codecs and Capability, in Lovink & Niederer (eds), Video Vortex Reader : Responses To Youtube, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam,.
• Cubitt, 2010, Making Space, Senses of Cinema(57).
• Fuller, M., 2007, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies In Art And Technoculture , MIT, Cambridge, Mass.; London.
• Mackenzie, A. 2008, Codecs, in M Fuller (ed), Software Studies : A Lexicon, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 48-54.
• Palmer, D., 2011, The Rhetoric of the JPEG, Paper presented at the conference ‘The Versatile Image: Photography in the Era of Web 2.0’, University of Sunderland

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 “address the complex assemblages of network society, which are not restricted to technological determinism, or the effects technology has on society, but encompass the complex foldings of technological components with other aspects of social and cultural reality”{%Parikka 2009a@5}. Here ‘components’ – the weird digital objects the authors and their collaborators explore – are approached via relations, enfoldings, actant-networks. ‘Assemblage’ and ‘topology’ signify not a background field of relations or context so much as as an active relationality with which objects are inevitably and inescapably entwined.

As an example, when Parikka says that he: “primarily addresses noise in the context of telecommunications, networks, and digital culture”{%Parikka 2011@258}, context is not some passive background or even determining space. Rather his noise objects (the sort of glitches that Steve Goodman explores{Goodman 2009} as well as real technological noise objects such as the telegraph and imaginary objects such as the volcanograph^⁠1) cannot be understood outside their relations with sonic (and scopic) culture, shifts in capitalism and technosocial dynamics. These relations are not where our focus should solely be. We need to look at, for and through objects. But those objects cannot be historically or theoretically approached outside those relations. Media archaeology’s mission to build a “nonsignifying take on media history”{Parikka 2011@257} demands that objects are more than representations. It demands a respect for objects but objects-in-relations. In contrast, an object-oriented media archaeology would demand an account of those objects that did not depend on relations. Here a telegraph or an imaginary ‘volcanograph’, an audio glitch or a protocol have an existence and power beyond those relations. As I will discuss, this opens up productive ways of addressing the weird, anomalous character of protocol.

Similarly Parikka and Sampson draw those components in terms of process. “We are not seeking out the (predefined) essence of the anomaly (whether expressed in terms of a representational category or intrinsic technical mechanism), but instead a process in a larger web of connections, singularities, and transformations”{%Parikka 2009a@6}. The component-object is best seen as a process. In terms of specific digital objects, for Parikka the ‘imaginary’ around the Morris worm, the metaphors and discourses in play were processuarl – invasion, vandalism, disease {Parikka 2009b@113} but the object itself was also processural. Its position within the assemblage (as well as the systems it ‘attacked’ or related to) was as process. It ran. It replicated. It acted. Its power lay in its working.

Finally the anomalous object must be seen as harbouring a potentiality that is actualised in particular historical moments, holding something in reserve as an assemblage or regime appears. Media archaeology’s mapping of truth-power or discourse networks or scopic regimes explores that becoming. It is here where a philosophy of relations, process and potential meets history and practice. As far as actual objects go Parikka approaches viruses as “philosophical and artistic machines that create new perceptions and concepts”{Parikka 2009b@122}. He discusses viruses in play in the Biennale in Venice as well as within IBM. The potential viruses harbour is not just for ‘good’ or ‘ill’, for ‘anarchy’ or ‘art’ but more fundamentally an inevitable potential to become, to be realised in different assemblages and regimes. The fact that a virus harbours a potential to create, recreate and reposition foldings in the technosocial assemblage means it generates new commercial, security and social practices and moral panics. Parikka’s media archaeology does more than historicise the object, it historicises the relations, becomings and potential through which that object must be seen.

This account of the object also has practical implications. In their work on ‘zombie media’ and ‘circuit bending’, Parikka and Garnet Hertz explore the creation of the “punctualized object”. They say: “Punctualization refers to a concept in Actor-Network Theory to describe when components are brought together into a single complex system that can be used as a single object. We refer to the disassembly of these single objects as “depunctualization” – which shows a circuit of dependencies that ties the owner to the corporation that manufactured the device”{Hertz 2010@6}. It is the position of components as elements in circuits of dependencies, active relationality and potential that opens up a space for what Galloway and Thacker term ‘exploit’ and Wolfgang Ernst explores as ‘monumental’ history{Ernst 2005@589}.

Their media archaeological practice-research exploring and exploiting vibrant material undead digital objects requires that those object-component-actants are considered as at least in part defined through relations and process. It is only then that their potential for discipline can be understood and their potential for reconfiguration, exploit or depunctualization can be released. “For the arts, as a methodological rule of thumb, objects are never inert, but consist of various temporalities, relations and potentials that have been brought together, but can be broken apart again”{Hertz 2010@8}.

An object-oriented perspective works towards the same understanding and practice but remains committed to addressing objects outside of their relations and in terms of their complete presence. In this account the virus or spam, the undead technology (or even protocol) require and deserve a philosophical framing as present, complete and multipolar objects. This is not just for some theoretical coherency (I will come on to make that argument), but also for practical purposes. As I will discuss, a willingness to entertain as well as create work with objects as inevitably in relations but not defined by them; as fully present, multidimensional but still definite; and as holding nothing back rather than waiting to become or become actualised, allows me to engage in and learn from forms of object-oriented photographic practice. Without that perspective I could not have opened up the real-sensual and fusion-fission dynamics of the object, and their governmental implications or built my scopic apparatuses, imagined and imaged my photographs.

¹ There is an interesting parallel with Harman’s willingness to account for imaginary as well as ‘real’ objects.

• Ernst, W., 2005, Let There Be Irony: Cultural History and Media Archaeology in Parallel Lines, Art History, 28(5), pp. 582-603.
• Goodman, S. 2009, Contagious Noise: From Digital Glitches to Audio Viruses, in J Parikka & TD Sampson (eds), The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, And Other Anomalies From The Dark Side Of Digital Culture, Hampton Press, Cresskill, N.J., pp. 125-40.
• Hertz, G. & Parikka, J., 2010, Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology Into An Art Method, ZOMBIE MEDIA:CIRCUIT BENDING MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY INTO AN ART METHOD. Vilèm Flusser Theory Award 2010, .
• Parikka 2009, Archives of Software: Malicious Code and the Aesthesis of Media Accidents , in Parikka & Sampson (eds), The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, And Other Anomalies From The Dark Side Of Digital Culture, Hampton Press, Cresskill, N.J., pp. 105-23.
• Parikka, J. 2011, Mapping Noise: Techniques and Tactics of Irregularities, Interception, and Disturbance, in E Huhtamo & J Parikka (eds), Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, And Implications, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, pp. 256-77.
• Parikka, J. & Sampson, T.D. (eds.), 2009, The Spam Book : On Viruses, Porn, And Other Anomalies From The Dark Side Of Digital Culture, Hampton Press, Cresskill, N.J..

Tomorrow’s the first of September and by my reckoning that’s one year until I’m supposed to have done IT. With that in mind and in the dimming afterglow of a month in France, a new plan:

Firstly, a change in title. “The Olympic Arcades Project” has served well but now: “JPEG: a quadruple object” seems nearer the mark bearing in mind the new structure. So what of 2012 I hear the funders cry. Well here is the draft of the “2012 Appendix”:

“At one level the 2012 Olympics ran through the whole project. My photographs that started the project were around the physical space of the Games as it was being constructed in the East End of London. At another level however it is important to say that this project was not about the Olympics, photography of the Olympics or even “imag(in)ing the Olympics”. My concern was not 2012 but protocol and objects.

My research questions were both large and small scale. I was interested in the relationships between the JPEG object and other scopic objects. Of course these have implications for how the 2012 Olympics are represented and seen, but I was not looking to map those representations and effects. Nor did I examine the role of different sorts of photographer/imager – the official and unofficial, the accredited and the unaccredited, the journalist and the activist. Rather I looked to explore JPEG at a particular moment: the period leading up to the 2012 Games.

I chose 2012 as the arena to conduct my practice-research experminets for a number of reasons: it was temporally and spatially located; it embraced different forms of imager and imaging practices; and like protocol itself, it was embedded and enfolded in complex connections. 2012 was a specific historical moment. In terms of the lead-up or the “Big Build” as it is called, the Games itself or the so-called “legacy”, 2012 was temporally located. The images and imaging practices around those events carried a time-stamp. It was possible to set limits within my research based on particular periods or historical moments. Similarly the Fence and the spaces of the site (specifically the East London site) provided a discrete set of images and photographic practices to work with – photographs, photo-works and photography within a particular local and geographic space. To have picked another historical moment (such as a General Election) would have been to open up to potentially global sets of images and practices.

Importantly, that specific geographical location of the 2012 site also allowed me to explore the workings of protocol-photography which went beyond “citizen journalism”. As I explored my photography’s relation to to that of the ‘swarm’ I wanted to work with images and imaging practices that were not necessarily consciously “photographs” or “journalism” (whether official or citizen). I wanted to explore the incidental, the domestic and local photography from imagers who would not position themselves as journalists or perhaps even photographers. I wanted to trace the operations of protocol within the rags ‘n refuse of the distributed scopic regime. By using 2012 I could define a specific geographical space and, using geolocative metadata, find images and photographic practices that were literally around 2012 but were not consciously part of the reporting or representing of the Olympic Games.

My final reason for using 2012 as a focus was driven by the project’s overarching object-oriented approach. Following the framework I used, 2012 could be seen as the sort of object within whose molten core my objects connected.

If one can see JPEG and Facebook’s algorithm connect in the heart of a data mine image object, so that data mine object can be addressed as connecting with a 2012-policing object within the molten core of a 2012 scopic surveillance object. This object too connects, with that of a Coca-Cola marketing object, the Press Association’s position as official News Agency object etc. This is not a case of hierarchically nested objects. All must be treated as at the same level if one is to address the nature and operations of objects and governmentality as an object-oriented assemblage.

A focus on 2012 therefore allowed me to explore another scale of objects in their specificity.

I approached photographing 2012 through the specific, actual, located objects in the liminal spaces around the Fence. Following Miller and Bennett’s (and indeed Walter Benjamin’s) argument that the rags ‘n refuse can offer a way into understanding history and society that can avoid semiotic discussions of representation or depth ontologies that  remove us from the actual and specific, I collected (another Benjamin echo) the objects around the Fence that bore the traces of historical processes, globalisation and governmentality.”

So now the project in a Tweet is:

An exploration of JPEG as object implicated in new regimes of scopic governmentality, using Harman’s concept of the “quadruple object”. (135 characters)

As such, the new ‘thesis’ outline:

• Intro
• Preface: The Digital Imaging Pipeline
• Lit Review chapter – approaches to the software object built around notions of relationality, processuality and potentiality
• JPEG object in theory chapter – outlining a Harman-inspired account of JPEG as a ‘quadruple object’
• JPEG object in practice chapter – account of how my practice highlights that ‘quadruple nature’
• The Govermental JPEG object – account of JPEG (object)’s connection to issues of governmentality etc (material from PLATFORM and PlatPol papers).
• Appendices: Imaging apparatuses (accounts of experiments) and 2012. I have decided to concentrate on two apparatuses rather than three.

And the practice? Here’s how it looks:

“My photography is digital. It is also about digital. I look to image and imagine the digital.

I have worked with a number of ways of exploring the digital, the distributed and 2012[1]. The particular photographic work that forms the basis for my exploration of object-oriented approaches to photography and protocol and the two scopic apparatuses I come on to discuss, is based on a concern for the encoding of light as data. My images look to deal with the journey of photons through software and hardware into data.

In my attempt to explore light as data (and so JPEG), I look to move beyond a representational practice – whether of 2012 or even of the digital. I am not looking to capture or communicate something about 2012 or even about JPEG but rather engage with encoding as a way of exploring the encoding object.

Because my interest was in exploring how JPEG imaging related to the contemporary scopic regime of distributed images and imaginings (of 2012), the social swarm of representations, I did not want to simply add to that infinite archive of images by adding my own ‘photographs’ – different views where signification is at the fore and ‘the photograph’ takes precedence over ‘the photography’. Had I built my object-oriented explorations around my images of vibrant matter or augmented views (as discussed in Appendix I), JPEG’s encoding of light as data would have withdrawn even further. I looked for a way to bracket this layer of photographic representation.

I used a digital camera which, like all digital imaging devices includes a CCD sensor, in-camera hardware and software that captures the light passing through the lens and encodes it as data on a memory card. As I shall discuss, this apparatus can use different protocols, even simultaneously. I replaced the lens with a pinhole and looked to photograph the light around the 2012, the transient, shifting material physics that crossed the security Fence at will; that could not be branded or spun; that was before the Bid was won and will be there long after the Legacy has been signed off; and that formed an object in all the distributed imaginings.

The pinhole served to remove the focusing device and the short shutter speed that render light as meaning-full, as focused significations, as representation. Of course a pinhole is still an optical device, a form of lens rendering an image and the slow shutter speed could have been achieved with neutral density filters. I had particular reasons for choosing to use a pinhole: I wanted my ‘images of light’ to be photographic. These were not to be scientific light samples, measures or collections of light intensities collected by a disembodied CCD. I could have built a scientific apparatus from camera components or simply opened the shutter and let light flood the sensor in my camera but I wanted to remain with ‘the photographic’. I wanted to use a camera and take photographs, just like the everyone else imagining 2012 with their Nikons, Canons, and iPhones. Having worked with pinhole cameras on other projects I also wanted to use the ghostly, sensual and withdrawn quality of pinhole aesthetics – which connect with my Husserlian/Heideggarian framework. While my work is certainly conceptual, I also wanted it to be aesthetic (as a way of addressing the issues of ‘allure’ that Harman discusses in relation to ‘fusion’). This of course ran the danger of introducing representation and the semiotic, ghostly images and shadows waiting to be ‘interpreted’. This too was deliberate. I wanted to make photographs (ready to join and perhaps critique the stream and the swarm). Consequently I needed to engage with representation. I sought to do that obliquely, referencing the semiotic and representational yet foregrounding the light-as-object.

My choice of a pinhole camera as the basis for my RAW/JPEG scopic apparatus also references the history of scopic devices and technologies. Technologies like JPEG are enfolded with other objects – real and imaginary, historical and contemporary. By working with an ancient/modern, art/science, analogue/digital object technology I could keep that enfolding present – if only to me as the imager.

In concrete terms I took my digital pinhole camera (and its attendant assemblage of hardware, software, human and unhuman objects) around the liminal spaces around the 2012 site during the final year leading up to the opening of the Games. I could have chosen a particular structure for when and where I ‘took photographs’, wrote with light. I could have traced a psychogeographic trail or a database of particular decisive moments for imaging. I rejected this approach because once again I wanted to remain within and yet somehow outside the photographic. As a photographer – like the millions of other imagers in the swarm – I wanted to choose the light to capture, sense or encode. Even (perhaps, particularly) in a world of distributed imaging, the imager has the choice to press the button (and let the Web do the rest). Rather than abdicate that power/responsibility, I decided when and where to open the shutter and encode light as data.”

So, after a summer not cycling up the Les Cammazes ‘mountain’ as often as I should and instead sitting at a keyboard, I think I finally know what I’m doing. Or at least I can see what I can hand in and possibly defend. Comments, tips, roadside encouragement etc. welcome as always.

So, the next year…

Well, I’ve reluctantly given up teaching for the year (although if anyone knows of any F/T gigs coming up…) so #birkbeckmedia is on hold. So it’s just 9-5 writing. Some bits will end up here as rag ’n refuse (just to show myself that I am being productive). Some aphorisms, soundbites and haikus may end up on Twitter. Oh and there may well be the sound of my soprano sax wafting over the 2012 site…