Belay: 28 February 2011

Belay: 28 February 2011 (For other belays and the idea behind them, see here).

I am exploring the relationship between the jpeg compression protocol and the new photographic and imaging practices of sharing, publishing, streaming, archiving and remixing online, by understanding jpeg as a process-actant, an occasion of becoming and perishing.

My aim is to understand protocol as “doing things” in the world, establishing ways of seeing, imaging and imagining (or imag(in)ing as I call it), just as other scopic apparatuses from the camera obscura to the most modern medical imaging tools have done. In particular I focus on how jpeg is implicated in the creation and exploitation of social digital archives that are enfolded in powerful material governmental relations.

These research questions arise from practice-research. Through a series of imaging experiments with protocol I have failed to pin down protocol but rather have been left with the trails of the issues, the traces of its operation and relations but not jpeg itself. I can find dot jpeg not jpeg. Jpeg withdraws from view, becomes and perishes. My practice has become imag(in)ing a digital imag(in)ing apparatus  which explores and makes apparent this becoming and perishing and the process-actant’s governmental implications.

The apparatus consists of a CCD sensor, in-camera software, a WiFi-enabled memory card, a WiFi network (including hardware, software and protocols), a website, social imaging websites and services and an HTML webpage ‘viewer’. This apparatus is a mixture of hardware, software and protocol. The apparatus works by ‘taking a photograph’/imaging, encoding the information from the CCD as ‘RAW’ and ‘jpeg/JFIF’ data on the card, and attempting to upload both those file/images to social archives – the digital rags ’n refuse that Apple seeks to control and Google and Facebook index and data mine. The “viewer” then presents the imager with the visible jpeg/JFIF encoded images as part of the social stream of images/imaginings as well as the unvisible RAW-encoded images. While the apparatus inevitably fails to do any more than show the traces of protocol (rather like the scopic apparatuses in a particle accelerator show only the traces of fundamental particles), its failure to work exposes the workings and the alliances within which jpeg is enfolded.

I look to account for the visible/unvisible, material/immaterial, becoming and perishing nature of jpeg through Graham Harman’s reading of Bruno Latour’s Irreductions and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of events and occasions in Process and Reality. While Harman goes on to develop an object-oriented philosophy (OOP) where objects can have an ontological status outside of what Latour calls “alliances” but I concentrate on his reading of Latour and its focus on the enfolded nature of objects. From this perspective, protocol is an object doing things in the world, an object-actant. As with all other objects, whether material or immaterial, real or virtual, the protocol-object is folded into relations with other actants in the network (NB not just computer networks). Its power arises from the relations or alliances in which it is folded. Jpeg’s presence in Google and Facebook’s businesses, Microsoft and Apple’s operating systems and Adobe’s software as well as my iPad and my daughter’s phone and social networking relations means that jpeg has become so enfolded and so everyday and transparent that it can be considered as a ‘black box’, a power-full object so firmly established we take its ‘interior’ (those actant-relations) for granted.

I address the way jpeg ‘withdraws from view’ as an object using Whitehead’s idea of ‘events’ and processes. From this processual perspective, jpeg is a quantum occasion, a moment of becoming. Each moment of becoming, each process of encoding/decoding, each working of light into data, each compression is a quantum occasion. That is jpeg. The process is not what jpeg does, it is what it is. Jpeg withdraws from view because each quantum moment of becoming perishes, only to be taken up again by another instantiation of jpeg, another occasion. My digital imag(in)ing apparatus is designed to instantiate that becoming and indeed practice that theory.

My project is not a discussion of philosophy: whether OOP is a valid ontology, let alone whether it is a good reading of Latour or the merits of Whitehead’s particular approach to objects. My discussion is not around the nature of objects, or what counts as an object, but rather what happens when you treat protocol as an object.

An object-oriented approach allows us to approach and map jpeg without recourse to a foundationalist or essentialist position that would see it as the source of scopic effects or power relations. Rather it can be addressed as enfolded in archival, governmental relations because of its nature as an actant-process.

My project will appear as a thesis and the apparatus.

The thesis will consist of a “literature review” where I will concentrate on Alexander Galloway (and Eugene Thacker)’s discussion of protocol, tracing its relations to the development of software studies and accounts of the network and WiFi. I will also discuss that part of software studies and film studies that focuses specifically on standards and codecs. The second theme of the review will focus on media archaeological accounts of the ‘scopic apparatus’. The aim here will not be to engage with the debates about  periodisation but rather draw out the emerging concern for the material apparatus/object as an instantiation of forces and power.

A ”theory chapter” will consist of an outline of the theoretical approach I am taking, bringing Harman’s reading of Latour (within a broader framework of speculative realism) together with a reading of Whitehead’s account of process.

The “methodology chapter” will outline my conception of practice hyphen research as based around the importance of failure and fragmentation as well as an account of the practice in conceptualising and ‘building’ the apparatus.

The “findings chapter” will draw an account of what the “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” can teach us about the workings of protocol as an object and how an account of jpeg as process-actant offers a particular way into understanding the governmental implications of digital archives.

Alongside and interwoven with this thesis will be the “digital imag(in)ing apparatus”. This will consist of a series of visualisations or imag(in)ings including:

  • instructions on how to build the apparatus
  • a diagram/map which visualises/imag(in)es the material/immaterial, read/virtual, hardware/software/protocol, present/absent nature of protocol as well as the alliances within which it is folded
  • a series of imag(in)ings of the apparatus in operation

Tweets for the week :: 2011-02-27

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Somewhere between pressing the button and doing the rest

The mashup happens downstream. The stream of imag(in)ings that jpeg enables, whether they are instantiated on a Flickr page, connected to a Tweet, on a Facebook wall or as part of  slideflow or maps mashup happen at the end of the digital imaging pipeline. More correctly they happen at the end of one form of the pipeline. From there they become raw material for other jpeg-enabled scopic practices of sharing, linking, embedding or other mashing. The imag(in)ings happen at the border between becoming and perishing.

By the time this instantiation happens, jpeg has usually long finished. It has withdrawn from view, become and perished. It can have been set to work on Flickr or Facebook for instance compressing bandwidth-unfriendly TIFF files when they are uploaded, but usually that work happens in camera. Without its work and status as actant, non of this would be possible in the current technosocial and political-economic assemblage. (Of course If the imaging industries and Web ‘community’ switched to a RAW standard, a different assemblage would be established).

The phrase “in camera” is particularly resonant. The latin phrase usually refers to a court case to which press and public are not admitted. It is out of sight, invisible, private. Its workings are hidden and only its results prove that anything happened. The verdict announced on the court steps is the trace of the legal arguments, processes and workings.

Jpeg literally happens in camera, in the software that turns data from the CCD into imager data on the card. But it is also in camera in that same evocative sense. It is hidden, private, out of sight. Only its traces (the jpeg/JFIF files) are visible as they are passed down the pipeline ready for the the viewer or the mashup.

This mashup is itself a scopic apparatus. It enables and structures a way of seeing. It acts as a window, in Anne Friedberg’s sense (2006). Combined with the power to screengrab, it even becomes an imag(in)ing apparatus. At another scale it is part of the scopic apparatus I call my “digital imag(in)ing apparatus”, the software/hardware, material/immaterial, real/virtual (in Deleuze’s sesnse) device that depends on jpeg to work the way it does. The mashup is downstream insofar as the javascript, html and css that make it work (appear) works with the jpeg/JFIF files that jpeg has provided. If jpeg had not supplied those files to Flickr encoded in a way it could read, the mashup would be blank, the window opaque.

The moment of encoding, whether it happened in camera or on Flickr has become and perished, leaving the traces of jpeg/JFIF for the apparatus to render and make visible and ready for other apparatuses to pick up and use.

Jpeg happens somewhere between the shutter and the card, between pressing the button and doing the rest.

  • Friedberg, A., 2006, The Virtual Window: From Alberti To Microsoft, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Inner and outer, visible and invisible

Although Adrian Mackenzie does not use the language of Actor-Network Theory or object-oriented philosophy, his account of the experience of ‘wirelessness’ shares a number of common themes, notably the way in which “wirelessness is thoroughly entangled with products and promises of economic value” (Mackenzie 2010: 145). What Latour would call ‘alliances’ are integral to wirelessness’ functioning and its nature as experience. Mackenzie however looks to William James rather than Heidegger or Whitehead as a way of unpicking that entanglement.

As has been noted, James’s account is one that emphasises movement and transition and the “practical inseparability of thinking and the things” (Mackenzie 2010: 14). For James philosophy needs to speak the language of ‘conjunctive relations’ (characterised by words such as with, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my), the language of movement and transition, the “more to come” (James 2010: 2476). This focus on process and movement is an antidote to “most social and cultural theories that tend to cut realities into things, selves, locations and relations” (Mackenzie 2010: 39). This focus on experience and movement continues in James’ account of “inner” and “outer” which Mackenzie uses to explore the issue of invisibility.

James, as a philosopher concerned with flat ontologies and perspectives, refuses to separate thoughts and things and inner and outer. They are “part of the same surface, the same place of conjunctive relations” (Mackenzie 2010: 146). What appears inside us and outside is an effect of how this plane is folded, not a fundamental characteristic of a thing. The same can be said of “visible” and “invisible” (or even “unvisible”).

For James, “inner”, “outer” , “thing”, “thought” are words of sorting, the sort of classifications that Bowker and Star identify in their concrete studies{Bowker 2000}. That classification is rooted in experience. “For [James…], the differences between an idea and a thing depend on the ways an experience acts on its neighbours, as well as how, when, and by whom such an experience is ‘sorted’” (Mackenzie 2010: 146). Once again there are parallels with a Latourian stress on alliances and translations as the source of power. Here entanglements can be complex but they are constituted by an actant’s status, position and visibility.

Where an inner experience differs from an outer is in that it is less affected by its neighbours. “It might easily blend or merge with its neighbors in ways that an outer experience of something hard might not” (Mackenzie 2010: 146). In terms of wirelessness, for Mackenzie what separates our (inner) affectional experience of wirelessness with the (outer) products, economics and politics of Wi-FI is not some fundamental difference or ontological category but the relations within which it works.

Mackenzie traces the ways in which wirelessness oscillates between “inner” and “outer”. One moment it is a feeling or experience of mobility and locationalessness, at the next it is to do with fixed locations in Starbucks or outside a signal range. One moment Wi-Fi is a product that can be advertised, bought and sold (outer and visible), the next it is a seamless, background environment (inner and invisible). The experience and category/standard of wirelessness is present and then absent and then present again, depending on how it fits with other (neighbour) experiences.

This is a different articulation of visibility/invisibility to Bowker and Star’s. There are similarities in terms of the stress on sorting but the categories are unstable and forever shifting.

This approach allows us to address the visibility/invisibility of the jpeg standard as similarly oscillating, in movement, as process. The withdrawal from view that we see at work in the “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” is not some fundamental opposite to a stable state of visibility, rather it is an articulation of the inner/outer oscillation which can also be approached through Whitehead’s idea of “becoming and perishing”.

  • Bowker, G.C. & Star, S.L., 2000, Sorting Things Out: Classification And Its Consequences, MIT, Cambridge, Mass..
  • James, 2010, Essays in Radical Empiricism, Kindle ed. B&R Samizdat Express,.
  • Mackenzie, A., 2010, Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism In Network Cultures, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass..

Visible and univisble standards

The visibility of jpeg-encoded data yet the unvisibility of jpeg itself is not a chance occurrence. The fact that in my “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” the process of light-becoming-information works the way it does is because of material and concrete actor-networks: Google engineering labs, Apple design studios, surveillances state departments, academic practice-research committees etc. It is these spaces and sites of jpeg instantiation that render it power full and condition its visibility.

Geoffery Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, in their discussion of categories and standards, emphasise the material location of standards systems. They say: “The hype of our postmodern time is that we do not need to think about this sort of work any more. The real issues are scientific and technological, stripped of the conditions of production”. They stress the importance of addressing, “the day-to-day work of building classification systems and producing and maintaining standards” (Bowker 2000: 10). Here standards are produced in material conditions, commodities churned out of factories, even if those factories are distributed and networked.

For Bowker and Star, the issue is how a particular scientific classification system or standard is instantiated in the world, how the classification of bacteria and microbes as distinct forms of life became a material (as well as (bio)powerful) part of the world in terms of company washroom regulations or hygiene legislation. Just as John Tagg traces the instantiation of eugenics classification systems and standards within photographic and governmental practices (Tagg 1993), so Bowker and Star locate standards firmly in the lab, the boardroom and the street. This is not just a history of standards but an archaeology of its working that parallels the media archaeological investigations of the scopic regime and scopic apparatuses. Here standards and systems are apparatuses of classification, “powerful technologies” (Bowker 2000: 319) enfolded within governmental relations and biopower and embedded in practice (Keller 1996). The historical content of Bowker and Star’s work is interesting in the same way as the sweep of Crary or Kittler’s but the point fro all these writers is more profound, it is about how any technology or standard is inevitably enfolded in material and governmental relations.

This is more than simply a critique of labelling, it is an exploration of the enfolding of labels as part of systems of knowledge – the ways in which: “‘truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it” (Foucault 1980: 133). How that regime of truth is instantiated in technologies including standards.

A key issue for Bowker and Star is how those technologies (systems and standards) become background, infrastructural or “invisible” within those very material settings. In this they draw on Bruno Latour’s account of translations and “immutable mobiles”; how scientific knowledge moves from the field, through the lab to textbooks. As Latour says of Mendeleev’s (standards) table: “What is also extraordinary is how chemical reactions taking place in gallipots and stills all over Europe have been brought to bear on a simple pattern of rows and columns through a long cascade of translations. In other words, the logistics of immutable mobiles is what we have to admire and study, not the seemingly miraculous supplement of force gained by scientists thinking hard in their office” (Latour 1987: 236-237). Bowker and Star identify this process, this invisibility at work in ‘Nursing Intervention Classification’ (NIC) a system designed developed by nursing scientists to standardise nursing interventions.

Bowker and Star are not in the business of attacking standards. “Black boxes are necessary, and not necessarily evil,” they say (Bowker 2000: 330). It is the networks within which they function, the alliances within which they are enfolded that render them power full and potentially ‘evil’.The invisibility that Latour identifies as the characteristic of a black box actant such as NIC or jpeg,   sits alongside a very real visibility in documents and practices. That technology or standard is invisible in terms of its pervasiveness within the network, its infrastructural location.

Adrian Mackenzie looks to William James to expand this concept of technological invisibility by reading his ideas of “inner” and “outer” experience as a way of exploring the “process of making something visible in some forms so that it can become invisible in others” (Mackenzie 2010: 226).

  • Bowker, G.C. & Star, S.L., 2000, Sorting Things Out: Classification And Its Consequences, MIT, Cambridge, Mass..
  • Foucault, M. 1980, Truth and Power, in C Gordon (ed), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, The Harvester Press, Brighton, pp. 109-33.
  • Keller, C.M. & Keller, J.D., 1996, Cognition And Tool Use: The Blacksmith At Work, Cambridge Univ Pr, Cambridge.
  • Latour, B., 1987, Science In Action: How To Follow Scientists And Engineers Through Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass..
  • Mackenzie, A., 2010, Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism In Network Cultures, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass..
  • Tagg, J., 1993, The Burden Of Representation, Macmillan Education, Basingstoke.

Imag(in)ing theory – a draft presentation

I am giving a paper at the Practicing Theory – ASCA International Workshop 2011 in Amsterdam next week. The paper is available here, but the organisers, thankfully, do not want people to read their papers but rather give a short presentation of their work and reflect on others’. This is my draft ‘talk’:

My work is somewhere between this (take picture) and this (demo viewer). This is a theoretical space, a practice space and a space of imaging and imagining.

I began with a photographic practice. I took and created images and explored new forms of imaging and imagining online, distributed, networked photography. As my paper tells the story I have been on a journey exploring what distributed imaging is practically and how to understand it theoretically. My work as a photographer and internet imager has been part of a wider shift in visual culture and visuality that following Martin Jay and others, I characterise as a scopic regime, a field of distributed image and imaging practices – sharing, linking, embedding, attaching, mashing.

It would of course be possible to address this regime through a number of theories – semiotic, psychoanalysis, theories of postmodernity or globalisation which would all produce their own methodologies. My theoretical approach similarly determined the methodological direction I chose.

My work is around the software protocols or standards that underpin our new scopic regime. Treating these protocols (particularly jpeg) as an ‘object’ following Graham Harman’s reading of Latour, we can see the jpeg compression protocol as an ‘actant’ doing things in the world: making images findable and viewable in browsers; making them small enough to be distributed and exchanged in mobile spaces; playing a part in Facebook’s face recognition business plans and Apple’s App store domination. For Latour, these are actant-alliances, the network relations that give any actant, material or immaterial, real or virtual its power.

I extend this object-oriented approach with a reading of Alfred North Whitehead who addressed objects as processes. For Whitehead, things in the world, human or not, are “events” single incidents of becoming.  These events are made up of “occasions’ quantum , discrete indivisible units of becoming that “become and perish”

Understanding the jpeg protocol from this processual perspective allows us to imagine it as a quantum occasion, a moment of becoming. Each moment of becoming, each process of encoding/decoding, each working of light into data, each compression is a quantum occasion. That is jpeg. The process is not what jpeg does, it is what it is. Jpeg withdraws from view because each quantum moment of becoming perishes, only to be taken up again by another instantiation of jpeg, another occasion.

Jpeg has a form of continuity in the documents of jpeg group, in the specifications and strategies of the imag(in)ing industries, in the alliances within which it is enfolded. But its ontological continuity comes from its quantum moments of becoming, its position as a process that becomes and then perishes only to become and perish with the next instantiation.

This approach demanded a methodology that could explore that process of becoming and perishing, the way in which – in Heidegger’s terms, the object withdrew from view. I needed a methodology that enabled me to get in and work with jpeg as process. Practice-Research as a complex-adaptive system offered such a way in.

Practice-Research as I try to understand it in the paper is a complex adaptive system of emergence. This differs from other accounts of practice-based research which imagine a cyclical connection between moments of practice and moments of research, moments of being, ratcheting up the process toward knowledge or accounts of practice as research where the two are braided with practice as the central attractor state. For me, the complex adaptive system of practice-research worked as a process of emergence – becoming and perishing rather than the attractors moments of being. This methodology demanded a practice similarly based around becoming rather than being.

I designed a series of experiments where it was the process (and often ‘failure’) that was important. My aim was not to create images or even mashups or objects. It was running the code or the apparatus that was important because it was in this process, this moment of becoming that jpeg began to reveal its workings and its position.

For me, it was only when my practical attempts to work with protocol failed, where the jpeg standard slipped behind the jpeg/JFIF image, that the sort of processes and alliances Whitehead and Latour talk about became apparent. It was only as I played with the “digital imaging pipeline” – the space between this (take picture) and this (demo viewer), that I could get to grips with jpeg as quantum-actant. My practice was an instantiation and imaging and imagining of the theory I was working with. As jpeg ‘withdrew from view’ yet simultaneously set network relations in motion, empowering web 2.0 businesses and technosocial relations in practice, its ontological status in theory became evident. As I watched the traces of its operation in the mashups and apparatuses I built become and perish like flashes of quantum life on a particle accelerator monitor, I was imaging and imagining Whitehead and Latour’s theory.

My most recent ‘experiment’ is a “digital imag(in)ing apparatus”, a scopic apparatus in the tradition of the camera obscura, the zoopraxiscope and the iPhone. It is designed to imagine jpeg as process actant, as occasion becoming and perishing but powerfully enfolded in corporate structures, governmental relations and what Matthew Fuller calls media ecologies.

The apparatus consists of off-the-shelf components, hardware and software connected together to allow jpeg to become, to encode light as data, enfold that data in the media assemblage and then perish. What is particular about my grandly named “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” is it runs in parallel with countless other “digital imag(in)ing apparatuses” in your pocket or bag, in the hands of fans at a gig, protestors on the streets or parents at a school sports day. These “digital imag(in)ing apparatuses” are more than the camera or the phone, each is the camera in alliance with the Wi-Fi network, the router, server and Web 2.0 services, the software and protocols of encoding, search and data mining. These imagers do not see themselves as “imagining theory” or using a “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” but they are. My “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” is only different insofar as it is also in alliance with academia.