Being protocol

The third set of experiments I used to explore my research questions were focused around “being protocol”, making protocol the work itself rather than the tool or even the inevitable centre. My aim was to approach jpeg as a scopic apparatus, not merely a component in a camera or screen-grab apparatus. Because the nature of jpeg was a withdrawal from view and a process of becoming and perishing, I designed the apparatus to focus on that process. Although I knew I could no more capture jpeg’s working than a particle accelerator could capture fundamental particles, I could trace its moment of becoming and perishing and, by focusing on the edges of that process, imag(in)e that process. My aim was to build an apparatus where one could see where jpeg was not and so be left with the hole, the moment where it was.

I built my apparatus around the idea of the “digital imaging pipeline”, a conception of how digital imaging works that engineers use to design and produce hardware and software. This pipeline draws an admittedly linear and hermetically sealed picture of light photons hitting a CCD sensor, generating (or being turned into) electronic signals which via software and software protocols are encoded as image files that are written to a memory card and then transferred to other storage and access devices (for a fuller technical account, see the Digital Imaging Pipeline appendix).

The apparatus (so named to locate it within an assemblage of past, present and future scopic and imag(in)ing devices that my media archaeology had looked to trace) is best thought of as itself enfolded. It is tempting to use the metaphor of an onion but to do so would perhaps be to invite conceptions of depth, essence and foundation. It is an enfolded topology of software and hardware[ref]This must be conceived of as material. My digital imag(in)ing apparatus is deeply material not only in terms of the physical existence of the  digital camera, a WiFi memory card, a router and a ‘computer’, but also in terms of the software and protocols which are material presences in the world, enfolded in alliances, subjects and objects of legal and corporate struggles as well as actant players in networks.[/ref].

Like all digital cameras, my Canon S95 has an “imaging processing engine”, software that gathers the luminance and chrominance information from the individual pixels and uses it to compute/interpolate the correct colour and brightness values for each pixel on the basis of neighbouring pixels using a demosaicing algorithm. Further in-camera software engages in noise reduction, image scaling, gamma correction, image enhancement, colorspace conversion and chroma subsampling. This process is engineered to deliver information that matches, as closely as possible, what the engineers have decided is ‘quality’ information – the best flesh tones, the right degree of sharpness and contrast range. Here data is enfolded into human judgements and aesthetics. There is no one objective image processing decision. This is a difference engine. And then, as part of what is known as the imaging (and I would argue imagining) pipeline, there is compression. The crunching of that data ready to be saved to the camera’s quaintly named memory card. Here the jpeg protocol, enfolded within the “imaging processing engine” compresses the data, writes information into the data stream and create a jpeg/JFIF file ready to be written to the card. At the same time the processing engine parses data from the CCD directly to the card as a RAW file[ref]Technically the data is not passed unprocessed. This is not binary signal that is written to the card but image information from the CCD. The difference with a RAW file is that it includes as much data from the CCD as possible. It is uncompressed and unprocessed. Also, usually the RAW file includes a jpeg preview file included in the data.[/ref].

Because I use an EyeFi card that connects to a WiFi network and directly uploads the image files/imag(in)ings to a server, my apparatus is enfolded in the Wi-Fi network relations that Adrian Mackenzie discusses{Mackenzie 2010}. The jpeg/JFIF file is automatically uploaded via WiFi to a folder on a website. The image/imagining is enfolded in the social stream and potentially immediately replicated and distributed as it is copied, shared, downloaded and cached.

The final component of the digital imag(in)ing apparatus is the viewfinder, the interface or window through which a user sees and interacts with my imag(in)ings. This again is an enfolded software/hardware device a browser window on a phone, a tablet or a PC. The viewfinder that the user looks through in my apparatus (paralleling the stereo viewer or the mashup frame) is a scopic device. What unites all these views is that they show the limits, the edges of imag(in)ing. They show the hole where jpeg’s becoming and perishing is. The show the traces of its working and nature by showing the gap where it should be. The show its presence by its absence.

When a user looks through the viewfinder, they see a list of digital files some RAW-encoded, some jpeg-encoded. This is a directory listing orf the uploaded files (images of the rag ’n refuse around 2012, of a screen with the slideflow running, of a 2012 poster on a bus shelter… whatever). This is a listing of imag(in)ings, some enabled by jpeg… some not. A viewer can click on any file to view the imag(in)ing… or not. Because if she tries to open/view an image that has been enabled by jpeg’s becoming and perishing as it encodes light as data, the image will open in the browser. The imag(in)ing will be render visible. If she clicks on that image’s sister RAW file (a software encoded record of exactly the same light), the image will not render. The browser will not “recognise” the format. Usually it will opt out of the visualising pipeline and offer to save the file. The imag(in)ing is unvisible.

My digital imag(in)ing device not show protocol. It cannot capture its becoming and perishings. What it can do is show the gap where it works, its absence (in RAW imag(in)ing) as a way of highlighting its process nature. It is only when presented with its absence in a RAW file that is an unvisible image, that its nature becomes apparent. What is does show is the alliances within which protocol works and through which it derives its power. As a jpeg/JFIF comes into view in a browser or on the camera screen or in the invitation from Flickr, Facebook or Twitter to upload, so jpeg’s fundamental enfolding with web 2.0 businesses and imaging industries becomes clear.

I chose to add one more element to the apparatus to disrupt those enfoldings and to attempt to take the apparatus off-Web while remaining networked. As a website directory, the files uploaded from the apparatus could be indexed and searched by software spiders from Google etc. Each imag(in)ing (RAW and jpeg/JFIF) could be catalogued, cached, archived and enfolded into data-mining businesses[ref]This issue is discussed in the Digital Detritus chapter.[/ref]. I added a script to my server that rewrote the name of the jpeg/JFIF files at regular intervals. This meant firstly that there was a chance that someone clicking on a jpeg/JFIF filename would not see the imag(in)ing rendered because the link between name and visible data file had been broken in between the rendering of the directory listing and the request for the file. It also meant that any attempt to pull my visible imag(in)ings into archives, search databases or indexes or datamines would fail as the search result/database entry would point toward a non-existint imag(in)ing… unless of course those search indexes and datamines worked with RAW, which on the whole they did not.

The digital imag(in)ing apparatus was not ‘beyond protocol’ but it was also more than just using it. In that the apparatus was the process, it was protocol. It was an an instantiation of protocol’s becoming, perishing and enfolding, just as it was an instantiation of processual and object-oriented theory. As with all my experiments this practice was run through with, and formed a space for the instantiation of theory. The practices of thinking through my “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” as well as constructing and using it, was theoretically informed. This does not mean that theory acted as some sort of background to this experiment or even as some sort of guiding principle as I worked on the design or use. Rather it was enfolded in the process/practice and the apparatus served as an instantiation of object-oriented and processual philosophy insofar as to use it was to set in motion processes of becoming and perishing and actant-alliances. The emergence of issues around search indexes, archives, scopic datamining and their attendant issues of biopower and governmentality came from the clash of practice and theory. It was as the apparatus was designed around process, and the the practices of becoming and perishing with which it worked provided a moment of theory becoming practice, that these alliances and issues emerged.

To work with this apparatus, both in terms of designing it and using it, was to bring together the experience of imag(in)ing using protocol (with its attendant network effects, affects and aesthetics) and imag(in)ing outside protocol. What it crucially brought in was a focus on the continuous tense, imag(in)ing. The practice-research experience of imaging using this ‘being protocol’ apparatus was one of focusing on process. This was not a matter of images or even the flow of images but a matter of imag(in)ing. The “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” is best thought of as an event. This is not a ‘performance’ but a moment of becoming in a Whiteheadian sense. Running my “digital imag(in)ing apparatus”, or anyone else’s for that matter, is a moment of becoming, an instantiation of process (including jpeg as a process-actant) that constitutes the scopic regime in a particular configuration. If one were to see the “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” as a thing, a product, then this process would be collapsed, the alliances flattened and the network stabilised. Protocol could withdraw from view and the alliances and processes (in relation to Google, Facebook, Apple et al) collapsed into a foundationalist or essentialist map. Where events, in their becoming and perishing, their process and failure, place the emphasis on heterogeneity, complexity and connection, products (even practice-products) stress homogeneity and stability.

I could have looked to explore the protocol alliances, topological relations of governmentality within search and archiving through theory alone. A political-economic critique of information space and media ecologies could certainly have mapped Google algorithms onto a structural critique of cyber-capitalism and data globalisation. As I discuss in the Literature chapter, software studies has provided just such mappings in its accounts of software packages and even protocols. Similarly I could have used my philosophical framework as a way of accounting for those process of subjectification, alliances and power relations. What both such theoretical approaches would have missed or at least marginalised would have been the experience of protocol. As Adrian Mackenzie argues using William James, the technosocial assemblage needs to be addressed as experience. The process of wirelessness or digital imag(in)ing is lived. It is in movement. It is process at many scales from jpeg encoding through the digital imaging pipeline’s hardware/software assemblages to the social space of image sharing and consumption, search and archiving. What a practice-research approach to that analytical argument does that a purely theoretical account cannot, is to firstly to be open to the presence of theory within any practice and practice within any theory. I could not build or use the apparatus outside of theory. The apparatus was – as an object and in its operation – an instantiation of that theory.

Secondly, the colliding of the practice of protocol with a theory of protocol “in camera”, through the experience of pressing the RAW/jpeg button and clicking on the RAW and jpeg/JFIF file links, make that scopic and governmental enfolding part of the assemblage. When I or anyone else use the apparatus by taking a photograph or trying to view one, theory and governmentality become part of the experience. I become part of Facebook’s walled gardens or Google’s databases. I become part of a social imag(in)ing practice that subjectifies and objectifies. I become enfolded in alliances. They are not only more apparent, they are coterminous, co-present to me as imager. Where a purely theoretical imager can avoid that experience and enfolding a practice-theory one cannot.

Using protocol

The second set of experiments explored the processual nature of the protocol object by working with it directly. By imag(in)ing 2012 in and through jpeg, I looked to move my imag(in)ing into a social space and also understand the relationship between that protocol as process actant and that regime of imag(in)ing.

Once again this understanding must be seen as arising from the productive clash of practice and theory within research, the coming together of fragments of, in this case, programming and imaging with my framework of object-oriented and processual philosophies[ref]There are clearly issues around the term ‘object oriented programming’ that could appear relevant here. This particular form of writing programmes, based on sections of reusable code, has only a tangential, perhaps metaphorical relation to a philosophy built around discrete but interconnected objects.[/ref]. Following my model of practice hyphen research, my understanding of protocol’s nature, working and power through alliances emerged from that meeting, the fragmentary dialectical clash of imag(in)ing practices and imag(in)ing theory.

These experiments took two forms: my own digital network images and network mash-ups.

I used an Olympus DSLR and a Canon digital compact to continue my project imag(in)ing the rags ’n refuse, the vibrant matter around the 2012 space. As I shall discuss in the next section, these cameras allow the light reaching the CCD to be encoded as RAW data or through the jpeg protocol as Jpeg/JFIF data files. With these experiments I used the jpeg protocol to encode that light-as-data at different compression settings.

I also used an iPhone photography App Hipstamatic as a ‘camera’[ref]Interestingly this App writes its name into the camera field of the EXIF metadata of the jpeg image, positioning a piece of software as camera.[/ref]. This App caused some controversy among photographers and photographic writers when it was used by a professional photojournalist, Damon Winter, on assignment in Iraq. Hipstamatic uses software to filter the image data – encoded as jpeg by the phone software – rendering a series of retro effects. A user is allowed to choose a lens and film (sic) that create a particular effect. She can also shake the phone to choose random ‘equipment’. The controversy arose over whether Winter had somehow abdicated control to the software. To post process an image to look retro (either in Photoshop or in a chemical darkroom) was seen as one thing to allow software to do it was epistemologically and ethically another. I used the random shake feature of Hipstamatic to add a layer of chance to my imag(in)ing. Just as with Kodachrome, I never knew precisely what I would get[ref].Hipstamatic’s use of photographic language and imagery continues as one waits for the image to be rendered by the software. The App informs you that “prints are developing”.[/ref]

These three sets of digital imag(in)ing practices, as with the analog practices, were enfolded with my theory – not only in terms of the vibrant material objects I chose to photograph but also the sense of becoming and perishing that I knew was happening ‘in camera’ as I pressed the button and waited the split second (Olympus and Canon) or 20 seconds (Hipstamatic) it took for jpeg to do its work, for the protocol to become, render the image and then perish only to be re-instantiated with the next shot. This conception of protocol’s work emerged from the interplay of the practice and theory as I walked and img(in)ed.

I also used my iPhone as an imag(in)ing apparatus. Rather than use the camera App, I used the screen-grab functionality to ‘take a photo’ of the stream of images on Flickr and TwitPic. By searching for images that were either tagged by the user as related to 2012 or had geolocations around the Fence as tags set by their cameras, I could pull in streams of 2012 images taken near where I was walking (or possibly taken on the other side of the Fence) recently or many years ago. I also used my Mac at home as an imag(in)ing apparatus, setting up particular tag or geotag searches and screen-grabbing the result. I took these images (screen grabs of image flows), these imag(in)ings of the distributed scopic web as well as of ‘2012’ and fed them back into the network. I uploaded them to Flickr where they could appear again in my or anyone else’s searches or screengrabs[ref]Strictly speaking the screengrab images themselves were not rendered through jpeg. They were not jpeg/JFIF images. The screngrab software on the iPhone and the Mac captured the screen as a PNG file. The point here however is that the flow of images, the searches and the geolocative archive  was enabled by jpeg.[/ref].

I also used Augmented Reality (AR) Apps as imaging apparatuses to pull photos taken around the Fence (inside or outside) and overlay them on the live view[ref]AR overlays data on the camera view. This data can include information from Wikipedia, Google searches or any other data source that provides geoinformation including Flickr and other photo-sharing sites.[/ref]. I also pulled in details of nearby brands (including 2012 sponsors) who made the location of their nearest burger bar or coffee house available. This flow of data, paralleling the flow of images, was grabbed in the same way. These screen-grabs were once again fed back into social imag(in)ing space by being uploaded back onto Flickr.

The second strand to these “imag(in)ing using protocol” experiments was based on imag(in)ing in and through the network. But rather than looking to capture that network imag(in)ing (shades of the decisive moment again), looking to imag(in)e the process, to focus on the flow.

I built a window. I used Yahoo Pipes[ref]A web 2.0 service that uses APIs and open protocols as a way of building simple mash-ups without programming (http://pipes.yahoo.com).[/ref] to build a ‘slideflow’ that pulled in Flickr images according to their EXIF metadata[ref]It is important to note that the metadata written into a jpeg/JFIF Image can be added by the camera software (including the jpeg protocol), the user at the time of taking or uploading, or by anyone else. Without forensic investigation of the history of the file and its data construction it is impossible to know the veracity, timing or status of the metadata my mashup was searching on. While this could be seen as a problem, it is also a productive issue insofar as it highlights the malleable and porcessual nature of the objects in question as well as the ways in which people use that metadata, tagging as apart of cultural and signifying practices.[/ref]. Similar to the imaging apps I had used on my phone, this created a view into distributed imagespace. The default setting for a Yahoo Pipes mashup is a slideshow (or slideflow as I described it). This very visual rendition of the code presents a film strip with a ‘window”. The viewer is positioned in a strange position seemingly passively watching a film but also actively peering (gazing perhaps) through a window into a seemingly limitless set of imag(in)ings. The viewer is also offered a maps perspective, an arial, God’s-eye view of imag(in)ings located in real space, rendered across a territory. Whether it is the familiar window or the equally familiar map, the viewer sees a complex and potentially overwhelming saturation of imag(in)ings through a metaphor that renders them controllable, familiar and located. Here jpeg is the problem and Yahoo Pipes’ software (a mixture of javascript and serverside sofware) the solution. The saturated rag ’n refuse of images that jpeg has enabled across social imagespace remains in play, an image archive mined by Google and Facebook as well as countless individuals. The mashups I created were at one level an interface to that space but at another they acted as imag(in)ing apparatuses, imag(in)ing that archive as views through a window or points on a map. It was this position of software as imag(in)ing apparatus that informed the third set of experiments where I explored the protocol itself as apparatus.

The practice-research experience of ‘using protocol’ technologies and apparatuses added an extra dimension to the issues and understanding that emerged from the “beyond protocol” set of experiments. By using protocol and the network image spaces it set in motion, I was able to see what happened when my now digital imag(in)ings clashed, formed alliances, or dialectical image relations with other imag(in)ings.  Here was a social imag(in)ing of 2012. This was a form of imag(in)ing that went to the heart of my sense of what photography was, my (self) image as a photographer and my response to Michael Freid’s title or maybe question “why photography matters as art as never before”{Fried 2008}. The issues of distributed authorship, fragmented visions and visualities, streams and flows of imag(in)ings within which I located my own work in these experiments emerged from the interplay of practically building the window/map mashups and theoretically encountering the status of my own images, practices and position as just one (jpeg-enabled) object among many.

This is not a simple ‘death of the author’, “loss of authority” issue of the breakdown in meaning or power. The clash of my practice and object-oriented, processual theory produced an understanding of that sense of loss in terms of the inevitable position of objects as always in networks, always in process, always becoming and perishing. The fact that my jpeg/JFIF Image was just one among many, that my photographic practice could not escape networked seeing, sharing and streaming was a consequence of the way objects (image objects, imager objects etc) always work. They can never exist in isolation or on an authorial pedestal.

By imag(in)ing through and with that position and by theorising through and with that sense of fragmentary enfolding, I could avoid a postmodern nihilism but rather look to a flat ontology and practice. One that would allow me to build a “digital imag(in)ing apparatus”.

I could have looked to explore this issue of “loss” or social imag(in)ing purely via theory. I could have called on frameworks from accounts of urban space to understand visualisation; from psychoanalysis to account for feelings of loss and trauma or the work in cyberculture and network  and information theory that I address in the Literature Chapter or the work in aesthetics I touch on in the Imag(in)ings chapter. Even leaving these theories aside, I could have just used my object-oriented, processual framework to account for working of jpeg and the practice of using it. I would argue that this would have provided a fresh way of approaching the issues. What such a purely (sic) theoretical approach could not have done is address how the practice of imag(in)ing when using protocol is enfolded with object relations and the emergence of a network imag(in)ing aesthetic. The way in which network imag(in)ing as a way of seeing and a way of pressing the button or using the mashup is processual and enfolded in object relations only becomes apparent as it happens, as it becomes. It cannot be seen, experience or addressed after the fact through the lens of theory alone. It is is in the fragmentary process, practice and experience of network imag(in)ing through protocol that we can account for jpeg’s nature and its workings.

Beyond protocol

My imag(in)ing ‘beyond protocol’ experiment was based around photographing objects around the Fence surrounding the 2012 Olympics site using analog film and cameras[ref]All three experiments were at one scale the same. My photographic involvement in the imaginings was in terms of images of things. I was exploring ways of imag(in)ing 2012 which were not focused on the site or even its position in the East End. I explored Jane Bennet’s account of ‘vibrant matter’ photographically. I began photographing objects, things, material rags ‘n refuse I found in the shadow of the Fence and in the surrounding streets. Some were literally refuse: litter, discarded materials others were more permanent: a canal side mooring ring, a material component of the Fence. I deliberately sought to frame the images in such a way that the object was the focus rather than the ‘thing in its environment’. I used close up and depth of field conventions to isolate the object representationally. My aim in abstracting these from their contexts was to relocate them in their material, political, social and technological contexts in a similar way to the way Bennett used her abstracted matter to open up a view of wider materialities and networks. What changed with the experiments was how those objects and images of objects were generated, used and positioned within the process and practice.[/ref]. I chose to use 35mm analog film, in particular Kodachrome, a transparency film that was famous for its particular colour space and saturation. Kodachrome was a film with a history in photography, almost an iconic position. It was the film of choice for journalists making the move from black and white to colour, of artists looking to make strange the everyday. What is more, Kodak had decided to phase out production of the film and it’s development process in November 2010 as part of a broader move towards digital. I bought up rolls of the film and after shooting, sent them off to Switzerland to be processed before Kodak’s arbitrary deadline. Like the objects I was photographing, the Kodachrome slide was a thing, a specific object, a material presence enfolded with myth, culture and professional practice. It was shot through with the processes, or as I would come to call them the alliances, within the photographic industries. It was an example of the sort of enfolded vibrant matter that Bennett talked of and that I was exploring.

My choice of cameras was also driven by this material focus and concern with photographic practice’s enfolded nature. I used a Leica M2 and a Belplasca stereo camera. Both material technologies had particular enfolded positions within photographic history, practice, culture and political economics. Neither was a neutral imaging device, a recorder. Both were material and deeply powerful.

Like Kodachrome, the Leica is iconic. It is the companion of Cartier-Bresson, the weapon of Robert Capa, the chosen technology of Gary Winogrand and Robert Frank. In fact the mythology of the Leica is such that camera is positioned as almost withdrawing from view, leaving just the eye of these artist/journalists. Such is its perceived engineering perfection, the Leica is a tool. Its greatest advocates do not sing the praise of its presence, rather they sing the power of its absence, the way it does not get in the way of their vision, their street walking or their art. When a police officer once told me I could come to the front of a gaggle of press corps because I had a “real camera”, I knew that the Leica had a particular mythic position enfolded with its very material presence. It resonated, vibrated across professional practices, cultures and social spaces. Similarly, when I joined the queue at the Post Office in November 2010 to send off my last rolls of Kodachrome and joined in a nostalgic conversation with another photographer doing the same, I knew that my choice of film was part of a cultural world, that ‘Kodachrome’ resonated, vibrated across photographic culture and practice. It was not just that Kodachrome and the Leica were objects of nostalgia or even just mythic. They were enfolded with how photography talked of itself, how photographers understood their world and how the imaging industries were reworking those histories, practices and discourses within the new technologies. Interestingly Kodak’s press release announcing the “death of Kodachrome” as it became known, talked of its past but also the company’s commitment to the future and to analog imaging. Similarly, Leica continues to make analog M cameras and even models it’s flagship digital camera in the same mould.

I also used a 1950s stereo camera, an East German Belplasca. This device was from a particular historical and photographic conjuncture, a moment when the possibilities of a stereo scopic experience were being resold and marketed[ref]The Belplasca (seen as technically superior but from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain) and the American Stereo Realist cameras were at the heart of revival of interest in stereo-imaging driven by images of and by celebrities as well as a desire to see the post-war domestic boom differently.[/ref].  This camera and other models targeted at the domestic imaging markets claimed to offer a particular form of experience that expanded almost beyond the visual to the spatial and maybe even the tactile. What is more they were built around, and possibly failed because they demanded, the personal viewing moment. Only one viewer at a time could have the experience. The use of a viewer device took the viewing subject out of a social scopic moment, passing prints around or sharing a slide show. My decision to use this device was partly driven by the desire to work again with a particular enfolded device, a camera that could not be delocated from it’s historical and discursive location, but also because it enabled me to work with the scopic experience.

Both cameras and Kodachrome were ‘beyond protocol’. The imaginings (images and scopic experiences) they created were not dependent on or determined by jpeg. Their alliances with the imaging industries and governmental practices and discourses were set in motion by actants other than jpeg. And their failure to find a place within social media (unless scanned  using the jpeg protocol[ref]Obviously a stereo image can be scanned as two separate image but cannot be viewed as stereo without special hardware or software interpollation.[/ref]) was down to their unvisibility as non-jpeg technologies.

The practice-research experience of imaging using these ‘beyond protocol’ technologies and apparatuses was perhaps familiar because this was the professional practice I was trained in as an apprentice press photographer. The use of an external light-meter; the mental calculation of exposure as a set of choices based around the Zone System{Adams 1995} rather than as a clear-cut identification of the right combination; the eye-level framing of the image according to the classic rule-of-thirds and Harold Evans’ precepts for a photo that ‘makes’{Evans 1997} – all of these professional cultural practices and habits not only set in motion particular images but also imag(in)ings. As I unconsciously worked through the ‘theories’ of the Zone System and the Decisive Moment{CartierBresson 1999}, I imag(in)ed the images I was taking, I pre-visualised in the way that I had done as a press hack, knowing what I needed to get, what the market demanded and my editor wanted. Not having access to the image immediately (as in digital) meant that I had to be sure of what I was doing and imag(in)e in a way that covered the bases. Although I was working through the theory/ideology of the decisive moment, my professional practice was built on the maxim “if it’s worth taking one of it’s worth taking three of; if it’s not worth taking three of it’s not worth taking one of”.  Imagining was in the service of images or more correctly the best chance of getting a usable and sellable image. Here professional security and reputation trumped the myth of the single image. Just as I automatically took a selection of landscape and portrait format images (so the editor could choose to fit the page), so I measured out the 36 frames (or 20 in the Belplasca) in professional as well as creative terms.

These imag(in)ing practices and images emerged from this complex system of professional practice-theory. My particular visualisation of the vibrant matter around 2012 emerged from these fragmentary rules (protocols we might say), habits and practices, refracted through particular technologies, themselves enfolded in their own histories and discourses.

This phase of the project was designed to imag(in)e beyond protocol or at least beyond the jpeg protocol. The absence of the compression standard’s ability to allow multiple images to be saved to the card made imag(in)ing a matter of decisions and professional judgements. Similarly jpeg’s relative inflexibility to encode the full range of light  detail gave my beyond-jpeg analog imag(in)ing the space to deal with a wider dynamic range of colour and tone. In short, as a non-jpeg imager I knew I had more colours, detail and range to play with.

Once the button had been pressed ‘beyond  protocol’, the absence of jpeg became even more apparent. Imag(in)ing stopped. Once the transparencies returned from the lab, they were my scopic experience to have or to share by inviting someone to the light-table or passing them the stereo viewer. The archive remained stationary and fixed, a unique set of material objects, actants within a limited scopic network. It must be noted of course that these Kodachrome slides remain enfolded in countless other global networks – Kodak’s business strategies, art and journalism and now academia, but at the immediate scale of their location as 2012 imag(in)ings, they were outside the distributed scopic web of images and imag(in)ings. They were (socially) unvisible.

This experiment was about more than the difference between analog and digital[ref]As I will discuss in relation to the digital imag(in)ing apparatus, it is possible to explore the unvisibility of if imag(in)ings in a digital space through the use of non-jpeg protocols.[/ref], it was about unvisiblity as a way of imag(in)ing, opening up the search for an imag(in)ing aesthetic appropriate to a network scopic regime. Where my practice-research approach to this question added value over a purely theoretical exploration was that it was only as fragments of practice and theory collided that the central issue of ‘unvisibility’ emerged. That unvisibility that being beyond jpeg entailed, emerged from a practice of imag(in)ing with cameras meeting a practice of theorising objects as actant processes.

I could have looked to explore the unvisibility of the Kodachrome slide, the beyond protocol image and imaging practice, purely via theory. My theoretical framework would have enabled me to build an account of the Kodachrome object as a process-actant, enfolded and unfolded within the scopic regime. So far so useful. What it could not have done is address how the practice of imag(in)ing with those objects is similarly enfolded and unfolded. The slide cannot be separated from the practice of its creation and consumption, the theoretical and discursive enfoldings within which I work. These are processes too and as actants in the network they must be accounted for. Only an approach that clashes practice and theory is willing and able to work with and through that flat ontology.

The Project

The project emerged from the collision of my theoretical work applying object-oriented, processual thinking to an understanding of software protocols with my photographic work around looking for a “network imag(in)ing aesthetic”[ref]This picks up on Vito Campanelli’s search for a web aestehtic{Campanelli 2010} and Victoria Vesna et al’s similar quest for a database aesthetic{Vesna 2007}. This is discussed in more detail in the Imag(in)ings Chapter.[/ref].

As I discuss in the Theory Chapter, I look to object-oriented philosophy and the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead as a way of theorising the operations and nature of things. Here an object is a vibrant process-actant ‘doing things in the world’, constituted by and constituting powerful alliances across industry, government and media. This was the way of seeing things I brought to bear when I looked through my camera viewfinder. I saw vibrant matter, objects as processes, and it was that I sought to imag(in)e.

As I discuss in the Practice Chapter, my creative work was driven by a concern as a professional photographer for a form of imag(in)ing appropriate to the network scopic regime. Going beyond a nostalgic desire for the scopic certainties of a mythic photographic time, this problematic  – this search for a  “network imag(in)ing aesthetic” was my practice, whether I was photographing vibrant matter around the 2012 Fence or the ‘Things of the Day’ I added to my website. As with protocol, the process was the key, not the product.

This theory-practice montage was the space of emergence where insights into digital imag(in)ing, alliances across the imaging industries and governmentality appeared. This sense of emergence and process as at the core of my methodology is subtly different to traditional accounts of practice-research.

Practice as, practice-led research and research-led practice

Graeme Sullivan’s Art Practice As Research (2010) carries the subtitle Inquiry in Visual Arts but his perspective can be seen as reaching beyond the purely visual arts[ref]Sullivan can be seen as located within the same discourse as Vic Burgin{Burgin 2006} and Desmond Bell{Bell 2008} in seeing practice-research as a political struggle for arts’ legitimacy. For him practice-research  emerged within an institutional and historical frame. He starts with an historical account of how art has always created new knowledge{Sullivan 2010@3-31} and when he gets onto the issue of contemporary discussions of practice-based and practice-led research, this is located in terms of responses to the OECD’s Frascati Manual  An internationally recognized guide for standards in research and development used to help develop policies and practices which includes a framework for defining research activity{%Sullivan 2010@74}.He continues this contextualisation by discussing the “academic art world”  {%Sullivan 2010@79-82} before presenting his own model. That model emerges from an account of practice-research as a political-economic and historical form located in particular material and professional relations.[/ref]. Sullivan locates his own perspective against the background of empiricist, hermeneutic and critical methodologies. Sullivan does not say these methods are invalid; he merely wants to argue that artists have something to add too. His project is to connect those approaches and methods together and position art practice as research, rather than as an outcome or a starting point. He visualises this relationship as a series of interlocking pieces. He places “art practice [as the] core around which inquiry unfolds” (p 102). Practice and critique are linked, intimately connected as two triangles forming a diamond “as theoretical issues are investigated through creating and critiquing” (p 106).

Through a series of increasingly complex visual figures Sullivan develops his metaphor[ref]There is of course a danger with visual metaphors, particularly when made concrete in illustrations. They inevitably collapse complex relations and can slip from a heuristic device to becoming a statement of equivalence. I repeat them here in order to clarify the writers’ positions and distinguish my own approach which I am conscious is also visual.[/ref] of the “braid, with its infolding and unfurling form that disengages and reconnects with core themes while continually moving into new spaces” (p 112).The final image has moved from a tangram-like two dimensional jigsaw to a more fractal-like, 3d, dynamic visualisation where, “irrespective of where visual arts research happens, the structure has similar qualities – it is simple, complex, and dynamic all at the same time” (p 113). Using imagery reminiscent of computer visualisations, the metaphor of the braid sees the core practice triangle connecting with interpretivist, empiricist and critical fragments, splitting, recombining and finally stabilising (Figure). Throughout this process, the visual arts practice ‘piece’ – while it may itself fragment into multiple practices, acts as the attractor pulling the complex system into a form of stability. Sullivan talks of practice as research but he could equally well talk of practice-based research. For him practice, in whatever fragmentary, complex and dynamic ways he pictures it, is at the heart of the system. It is practice that acts as attractor.

Hazel Smith and Roger Dean also go for a visual metaphor (Smith & Dean 2009). They draw a picture to imagine what they characterise as practice-led research and research-led practice. Their willingness to reverse the terms around the conjunction ‘led’ is important. Their diagram has separate zones for practice-led research and research-led practice within what they call an “iterative cyclic web”. They too see a dynamic process but where perhaps Sullivan pictures a folding/unfolding movement, here the image is one of the cycle: start-end-start with a ‘research phase’ and a ‘practice phase’ connected, repeated and ratcheting each other up as a project moves forward.

Smith and Dean’s account can sometimes sound almost functionalist: “idea generation leads to experiments, gathering of data and/or analysis of theory or criticism. This may be followed by the development or synthesis of material and can, in turn, lead to the testing of the theory, either empirically to by argument and comparison, with outputs at a number of possible stages”{%Smith 2009@21}. Their figure is certainly more linear than Sullivan’s but it is not a single movement. They position it in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome (2004) “in which any point can be linked to any other and there are ‘multiple entryways and exits’” (Smith & Dean 2009: 21). Around the edge of Smith and Dean’s core cycle, sub-cycles form. These “smaller circles indicate the way in which any stage in the process involves iteration” (p19). As one follow the process of evolution around the circle, new organisms form and develop or form and die off, feeding back into the broader ecosystem.

The hyphen

Both Sullivan and Smith and Dean make use of language and imagery derived from complexity theory which argues that the whole is more than the sum of the components. At large and small scales, systems have characteristics that are the same. They are ‘scale free’, ‘self similar’ or fractal. Within complex systems, small units, or ‘actants’ (whether atoms, neurones, ants, populations, share dealings, bits within a computer etc) interact in complex ways and generate particular states. These states or ‘attractors’ are poised on the ‘edge of chaos’[ref]Chaos here is used in the technical sense as a particular non-linear formation. Within complexity theory complex adaptive systems are poised on the edge of this non-linear chaos. For accessible introductions see{Johnson 2009}{Holland 1995}{Urry 2005}.[/ref]. The system settles but only temporarily. It is this movement where a system settles around an attractor only to be moved on to another (not necessarily higher) level of organisation, that has proved so attractive to those seeking to understand biological, economic and even cultural systems[ref]See for instance Manuel De Landa’s attempt to write a non-linear history{DeLanda 2000} where social structures (whether material or non-material, human or not) emerge from complex historical processes that cannot be traced to a founding essence or dynamic. Rather De Landa argues, ideas of social causality must include an understanding of the sort of feedback mechanisms that scientists find at work in chaotic and complex adaptive systems.[/ref]. For both Sullivan and Smith and Dean, the focus is on the attractor state. For Sullivan, practice acts an attractor, stabilising the complex, dynamic movements within research. For Smith and Dean, the swirls and eddies within the cycle of practice-research-practice also act as moments of stability, pauses in a field of complex processes but also sparks for new micro webs.

There is a form of continuity and coherence (holism) to both Sullivan and Smith and Dean’s pictures. Although Sullivan’s tangram shatters, it reforms. Although Smith and Dean’s circle has eddies, they are tied into a coherent ecosystem. A particular research question or idea, a particular practical experiment may shoot off from the project but it is soon brought back and woven into a complex meta-narrative as an attractor state.

My work however suggests that such a focus on coherence and holism undermines the dialectic power of practice-research in the productive clash of theory and practice[ref]Here there is another connection to Benjamin’s Arcades project where he talks of the dialectical image as a tool for understanding and writing history. See {BuckMorss 1989}.[/ref]. By focussing on moments of stability rather than processes, that productive collision – where the idea of things in process overlays the viewfinder, or where the failure to get beyond ‘the image’ highlights the becoming and perishing of the protocol object – is never faced. My work demanded a different conception of the practice-research system, one that could account for it as process and as one based on emergence. As a way of escaping what I saw as the problem of the conjunction (practice led practice based) however unstable it was drawn, I replace it with a hyphen: practice-research. The hyphen[ref] I am conscious that the hyphen is a loaded tool to use. Circular debates about its presence or absence for post(-)structuralists/colonialist/feminists et al are never far away and of course Latour is no fan of hyphens. He is clear: “There are four things that do not work with actor-network theory; the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen! Four nails in the coffin”{Latour 1999@15}. For him the hyphen prefigures a return to modernist oppositions. “It is an unfortunate reminder of the debate between agency and structure into which we never wanted to enter”{%Latour 1999@21}. A core aim of ANT is to explore how actors are enfolded in networks which are themselves the traces of actors in process, movement, translation and alliance. For Latour, the hyphen gets in the way. Rather than signaling a bridge it signifies a gap, a space, something to be connected. I would argue however that the connotations of a bridge and a gap/space that Latour seems to fear are exactly the point because it is in that space of emergence where the power of practice-research as a way of understanding complex systems of emergence and actants in movement becomes possible.[/ref] allows practice-research to embrace the fragment and failure that I was dealing with in the Laboratory – the fragmentary nature of the experiments and their failure to capture protocol as it withdrew from view or deliver a stable “network imag(in)ing aesthetic”.

My aim in establishing my experiments was not to establish an iterative process leading to the holy grail of an account of protocol nor create attractor states that would deliver knowledges. Rather it was to set in motion a process of emergence which could begin to unpick the enfolded relations and actor-networks that gave character to the digital image-object and the distributed scopic regime.

The hyphen embraces the fragment as a way of generating connections (networks). Just as Benjamin’s fragmentary writing of history in One Way Street (1997) and the Arcades Project (2002) used a form of montage to collide fragments in order to generate dialectic images, so an opening up, rather than closing down of the fragmentary moments and practices allows new sparks across the gap between practice and theory. The experiments as processes, were fragments – moments of practice-theory emergence and becoming. Their power lay not in being subsumed back into a meta-process but rather in being allowed and encouraged to collide, translate and connect.

Similarly, while Sullivan and Smith and Dean – along with many other writers on practice-research method – are not afraid of failure, positioning it as part of a longer-term (learning) process, they do not see it as at the core of the issue. I would want to argue  however that as well as being a bridge and a gap for fragments to spark across, the hyphen is also a space where neither practice nor theory works, where they fail, where they are left chasing protocol and its aesthetics rather than pinning it down at an (attractor) moment of stability. Failure is in some ways more important than success for an object-oriented practice-research project.

It is in the ‘failure’ to find jpeg, the way in which my experiments are always left with the traces rather than the ‘thing’, that the nature of protocol as process-actant becomes most apparent. If I had somehow managed to capture jpeg or imagine its aesthetic, the alliances and process within which it was enfolded would not have become so visible. It was in its process that its relations to search and social networking became clearer. It was in its becoming and perishing that its everyday enfolding in business practices and governmentality were brought to light. That process and perishing that meant my experiments ‘failed’ were the moments of emergence.

The hyphen symbolises emergence and the gap or failure. Where Sullivan and Smith and Dean certainly draw attention to process, their focus is on the moments of stability, the experiments or practices where an actant has achieved some form of stability or an attractor state has stabilised momentarily. However it is the spaces between those moments that are the most important. The hyphen draws attention to that space. It symbolises a connection but also a disjunction between practice and theory.

It was this conception of the hyphen, a willingness to embrace fragments and failure that formed the methodological basis for my laboratory.

The Olympic Arcades Laboratory

The Olympic Arcades Laboratory was the name I gave to the series of practice-research experiments I developed to explore the operations of protocol within the scopic regime. The idea was to create a space where theory and practice could meet, where a framework addressing protocol as an object-actant and a process could rub up against imaging practices looking for a network imag(in)ing aesthetic in an effort to generate new ways of understanding protocol in network and software in camera.

The name “laboratory” drew attention to the provisional nature of the experiments and a focus on process rather than product. “Arcades” was a reference to Benjamin’s fragmentary approach to writing history and his belief in the power of the rags ’n refuse of culture and society as a way into understanding processes, alliances and networks (Benjamin 2002). The ”Olympics” was a reference to the photographic project that started my interest in distributed imaging and protocol and the case study/raw material I used[ref]It is important to address how the 2012 Olympics fitted into my project and methodology. At one level the 2012 Olympics ran through the whole project. My images and imaging that started the project were around the physical space of the Games as it was being constructed in the East End of London. As it developed towards an exploration of the digital image-object, imaging and protocol, I used the distributed imag(in)ing of “2012” as the space to explore. 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”. The object in my laboratory was not 2012 but protocol. My research questions were both large and small scale. I was interested in the nature of a protocol-driven scopic regime and also the nature of the protocol-object. 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 explored the status of the scopic regime and the protocol-object at a particular moment: the period leading up to the 2012 Games. I chose 2012 as a focus 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 alliances. 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 experiments 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 imag(in)ing practices to work with – images and imaging practices 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 imag(in)ing practices. Importantly, that specific geographical location of the 2012 site (and the imag(in)ing practices around it) also allowed me to explore protocol-driven imag(in)ing which went beyond “citizen journalism”. In order to explore the operations of protocol, I specifically 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 imag(in)ing 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[1]. By using 2012 I could define a specific geographical space and, using geolocative metadata, find images and imag(in)ing 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 an object – doing something in the world as a brand, an ideology but also as an actant in complex alliances with corporate, media and academic actors. From this perspective, 2012 emerged as a particular object as it was translated in and through different alliances: whether the work of Coca-Cola’s marketing team, the Press Association’s position as official UK Olympics News Agency or the work of Professor Andy Miah. The range of alliances and networks within which 2012 was enfolded meant the Olympics was a particular fertile field for addressing the nature and operation of objects.[/ref].

The laboratory was built around the idea of the hyphen insofar as it was designed to maximise the operation of fragments and open up the possibility of failure. The experiments were designed as processes (of imaging, network imaging and protocol imaging).These processes generated fragments of images, of moments of becoming that were encouraged to clash with concepts of object, actant and becoming. The experiments were designed to bring those fragments together to enable a form of emergence that yielded new insights or failures that in turn highlighted the nature and working of protocol.

The work of the laboratory can be divided (somewhat arbitrarily) into three sets of experiments: imaging “beyond protocol”; imagining “using protocol” and imag(in)ing “being protocol”. Although the latter experiment forms the major part of this project, the other experiments should not be seen as precursors, ratcheting up the practice-research in the iterative way that Smith and Dean propose (2009). As I have argued, my methodology rejects the idea of stable states (experiment #1 followed by experiment #2 followed by experiment #3) generating knowledges. Rather here the there experiments were enfolded. Experiment #1 imaging (the creation of photographs) was a core part of the ‘digital imag(in)ing apparatus), as was the network and distributed imaging space explored in experiments #2. As the practical experiments and the the theoretical concepts (actant, process) were enfolded, so the knowledge of jpeg’s alliances and nature emerged. The account of the three scales of operation should be read in that light.

My practice is around exploring the potential for a network imag(in)ing aesthetic, a way of imaging appropriate to a protocol-enfolded distributed scopic regime where imag(in)ings were decoupled from the punctum at the heart of the decisive moment and where imagers were deskilled and disintermediated from a professional authorial position and where imag(in)ing was flattened as a technosocial practice – where it failed to matter as art. Mine was not a fatalistic or even nostalgic practice. I did not bemoan these changes so much as seek to look for what practice could develop, what documentary or art forms were appropriate to that new space. As I identified protocol as a key driver of these shifts and this new regime, I looked to imag(in)e beyond protocol.

Introduction

In the guise of a long-suffering PhD supervisor Latour tells his rhetorical student: “If I were you, I would abstain from frameworks altogether. Just describe the state of affairs at hand”{Latour 2004}. Following this lead, my “Methodology Chapter” seeks to present the approach I took to my research question by explaining how and why I developed my Laboratory and how this led to my particular approach to practice-research.

As I will come on to argue, I understand practice-research as a methodology based on emergence, the productive   clashing of practice and theory setting in motion particular research questions and knowledges. It is the coming together of imaging practice and theoretical imaginings around objects and processes, that allows me to explore the software “in camera” and the scopic/governmental alliances within which it is enfolded.

At one scale this is a methodological account, an account of a way of working appropriate to my research question and field. I will argue that to approach practice-research as an issue of emergence rather than as a cycle or a topological diagram allowed me to explore the complex enfoldings of practice and theory as a process rather than as a series of states.

At another scale this is a personal account. As I realised giving an early version of this chapter as a paper at the ASCA conference in Amsterdam in March 2011, as a professional photographer I am personally enfolded in the issues, problematics and alliances in play. My methodological approach acknowledges and works with that investment and my own sense of an ‘aesthetic problem’, the sense that “photography (fails to) matter as art as never before”, to reverse Michael Fried’s claim{Fried 2008}.

This chapter is in two broad sections. In the first I outline the research questions I was looking to explore and the theoretical frameworks (discussed in the Theory Chapter) I was using to frame that exploration. I then discuss two influential models of practice-research{Sullivan 2010}{Smith and Dean 2009} and why I chose to imag(in)e my methodology in a slightly different way.

Having established my research questions, frameworks and approach, I go on to “describe the state of affairs” of the project. The aim here is to lay out clearly what I did and why I did it, but also to explore the implications of my particular approach for an object-oriented approach to software, media archaeology and scopic governmentality. Mine is clearly a theoretically-informed project. A key concern throughout my work has been whether I could have explored the relations between jpeg and the current scopic regime from a purely theoretical position. Would a philosophical thesis have been as powerful as a practice-research one. As I outline the work of the “Olympic Arcades Laboratory” I look to answer that question by imagining a different project, one where I had not taken RAW/jpeg images, not built mashups and “digital imag(in)ing apparatuses”, where I had never looked to engineer a device that worked with jpeg as an object and a process.

I describe these two states of affairs in terms of three sets of experiments in the laboratory. Firstly I discuss my imaging of “vibrant matter’, the rags ’n refuse around 2012. Here I was looking to explore my sense of an aesthetic problematic in the scopic regime through an attempt to go “beyond protocol” to imag(in)e outside jpeg. My second set of experiments looked to deal with that problematic through “using protocol”. Rather than looking to go beyond protocol, I sought to push it to its limits and break open its black box through a series of mashups. My third set of experiments worked through “being protocol”, engineering a “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” built around jpeg  as a way of exploring the edges of protocol, where it works and fails, where the “beyond”, the unvisible is, what using (the becoming and perishing work of jpeg is)  means and what that can tell us about jpeg’s workings and power.

Although of course these three sets of experiments happened in a particular order (although often I moved backwards and forwards between them), I do not want to discuss them in terms of a linear cyclical development where practice ratchets up knowledge in each iteration. Rather I see these experiments as instantiations of practice-research, as emerging from a coming together of particular creative practices with particular theoretical understandings and particular ‘personal’ concerns.

Running alongside these three accounts is an alternative imagining, an account of a different project where the workings of protocol and its stake in the contemporary scopic regime was approached purely through theory. This account is not designed to prove that my practice-research approach is somehow better but rather to highlight that it is different.

When Latour’s student reacts in horror: “‘Just describe’. Sorry to ask: but is this not terribly naïve?”, the supervisor responds sagely: “To describe, to be attentive to the concrete states of affairs, to find the uniquely adequate account of a given situation – I have, myself, always found this incredibly demanding”{Latour 2004}. My (just) description of the state of affairs in my laboratory is designed to provide an account of a methodological approach appropriate to a research thesis but also itself to act as a space for an exploration of practice-research as a way of approaching actant-networks.

• Fried, M., 2008, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before, Yale University Press, New Haven.
• Latour 2004, A Prologue In Form Of A Dialog Between A Student And His (Somewhat) Socratic Professor, in C Avgerou, C Ciborra & F Land (eds), The Social Study of Information and Communication Study, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 62-76.
• Smith, H. & Dean, R.T. 2009, Introduction: Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice – Towards the Iterative Cyclic Web, in Smith & Dean (eds), Practice-Led Research, Research-Led Practice In The Creative Arts, Edinburgh Univ Pr, Edinburgh, pp. 1-40.
• Sullivan, G., 2010, Art Practice As Research: Inquiry In Visual Arts, 2nd ed. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks [Calif.].