Not sure if anyone’s following this stream but the rags ‘n refuse are running a little offline at the moment as I build a lit review. The fragments will return as I begin to muse more on object oriented photography – the next and fun bit.

The fact that the iPhone tracks a user’s movements and saves that data to an unencrypted file on the user’s handset and the computer and potentially in the Cloud is more than a  matter of privacy. It is a matter of objects, and object-oriented approaches to media can offer productive ways of exploring the implications of this software activity.

The IoS software is not a single unity. It is an assemblage of processes, protocols, routines and subroutines. It connects with hardware components such as the camera ccd, the lens, the GPS receiving chip, the screen etc. At another scale it connects with the human user, the corporate walled garden and its software, the factory manager in the manufacturing facility in China as well as more immaterial actants such as the Apple brand. All of these elements are in play in a complex mesh or media ecology. This fractal complexity is commonly agreed. The question comes in terms of how to address and ultimately intervene in that assemblage or actant network.

As Harman argues in Prince of Networks, Latour’s democratic account of objects as actants takes us a long way towards a framework that can explore these complex sets of connections, enfoldings and ecologies. Latour, and Harman’s willingness to place hardware, software, humans and ideas and ideologies on the same footing opens the possibility for a picture of the actant-network in its multiple scales and dimensions. Similarly Jane Bennett’s approach to actants as vibrant matter allows us to open up seemingly non-concrete actants such as electricity or protocols to a materialist/realist analysis.

The point of difference for Harman is that those objects need to remain the focus and that they can and should be addressed outside of any relations. In his terms objects exceed their qualities, accidents and relations. Following this account, that component of the IoS software that logs location via cellphone mast triangulation should be addressed as an object above and beyond its relation to the other actants. We can never encounter the totality of that object, we only ever encounter a particular instantiation or running of that object. It withdraws from view and from relations. It always remains more than our perceptions or encounters. In fact we, or any other object in the assemblage, encounter a particular instantiation of that software-object. The phone’s hardware memory card encounters a dimension of its working in the data it records. I encounter a visualisation of its working when I use Pete Warden’s software object to overlay that data trail on a map. For Harman, the point is that these relations, or connections as he calls them, are not the full story. They never exhaust the nature or power of the object.

It is important to note that Harman does not deny relations, he simply denies the primacy of them. The puzzle for him is how objects connect if they withdraw from view. His answer is that they connect within objects, that objects form the bridge between objects. Here the connection between that component of the IoS software that logs location and the SSD happens within IoS object or perhaps the geo-locative IoS object. The encounter between the logging software object and the ‘image’ of the SSD (i.e. not the totality of the SSD object) and that between the SSD and the ‘image’ or intentional software object, is a specific, actual encounter that can be addressed at the scale of objects. The actant-network or assemblage is real, but it is does not have a primacy. It is not the context, background or ‘plasma’ that gives meaning or power to objects. Objects can and do have an existence, presence, power and capacity to connect apart from that field of relationality and potentiality. This is particularly important in the case of software such as this where there is no need, possibly even no intention of human perception or relation, no broader field. The logging is a machinic connection – machine-object connects with machine -object. Regardless of whether this software was written as part of some Apple or CIA conspiracy or simply an ‘accident’, coding creep, that software working happens outside the human-world correlation and that is why its object-connections beyond any relational field is important.

An object-oriented approach that explores objects in their actuality and specificity allows an understanding of those machinic dimensions of assemblages and places those connections (within objects) on the same ontological footing as human-technology connections.

The RAW file demands ‘processing’ in a form of digital darkroom before the information as data can be visible as an image. Without that protocol/software processing the RAW data is unvisible. Even to open a RAW file in an image editing or image-organising application is to render the RAW data as image, unprocessed, approximate, default but still rendered visible. It is that rendered canvas that the RAW photographer uses to make her processing decisions that the software and protocols allow – white balance, gamma points, even sharpness levels. That software processing is part of digital photography, every bit as much as printing the negative in a traditional chemical darkroom was, perhaps more so in that a chemical negative could still be ‘seen’ as it was held up to the light. It was always, already an image. A RAW negative is not. It cannot be ‘seen’ without processing… by humans at least. It is of course possible for machine vision to ‘see’ that data and integrate it into a database, a surveillance system etc. Here software can access the RAW data without rendering it as an image. Once it has been processed, it can be saved as a visible image file (even as a jpeg) or output via a computer printer to a print.

Ansel Adams famously referred to his negatives as musical scores and each printing as a performance. Henri Cartier-Bresson on the other hand had no interest in printing or the print. He happily passed his score to another, content with having written it, with the writing. The position of the negative and the print as objects, or in the digital space, the RAW file, the rendered image, the saved image file and the print is another aspect of digital photography where an object-oriented philosophy can add value.

The RAW file, the pre-processed image, the processed photograph and a print are all objects. They all have a unity and presence beyond their relations to each other or the software, protocols, humans, hardware, markets and laws which are also in play in the photographic assemblage. A relational account of these actants would see their power as derived from the alliance within within which they work and which constitutes them as objects. Here it is the relation between the print, the gallery, the art market and the archived image-file that constitutes a digital photograph as powerful and ontologically significant. An object framework that focuses on objects as occasions, would stress how the rendering of the RAW data as pre-processed and then post-processed images on screen are moments of becoming.

To work with a non-relational, object-oriented philosophy is not to deny connection or process. Rather it is to see it as a matter of objects, not of something broader, wider or outside. The reason that Harman develops his account of objects connecting within the core of other objects is because objects clearly do connect or relate, the question  is how can that happen when objects are more than their relations, when they withdraw form view and relations, when it is impossible for an object to fully encounter another. Harman’s use of Husserl’s ‘intentional objects’ and his account of how object x encounters the image of object y (its intentional object) within a new object, z, enables us to explore the photographic assemblage in its actuality rather than as the outcome of something else.

Here the RAW file I shoot, the temporary processed image file in the computer’s RAM or cached memory that I refuse to save as an image file, the print, the archival inks, the PhD thesis within which it is bound as well as the countless protocols, software and hardware, human and unhuman actants are objects in a specific scopic apparatus and photographic assemblage. The connections between these objects, the connections the render that assemblage powerful and significant whether in terms of the the particular historical moment for the art market or academia, for culture, aesthetics or governmentality and biopower, happens within objects: the “PhD practice-research work” or the “photo”. This is not a semantic point. By working with the PhD object rather than the academic relational field enable us to account for the weird agency of objects and address the complexities of assemblages in their specificity, from the bottom up.

An object-oriented approach allows us to explore the implications of the fact that the object that existed between the RAW data and the print had a temporary existence and connected with those objects within the core of the Photoshop temporary file object. This temporary, virtual perhaps, object is significant because it is the site of software processing, protocol-work. It shows the limits of the RAW standard and by implication the edges of jpeg’s visibility. It makes apparent the workings of the scopic apparatus. These issues are lost if one strays from looking at objects as objects alone. If instead an object is a site of relations or becoming, then that temporary object is an instantiation of something else, a broader software actant perhaps. The assemblage under investigation becomes the foundation rather than the outcome of objects.