I strive for the mundane

In his discussion of location in relation to wirelessness, Adrian Mackenzie points out the importance of the less than interesting:

“The act of ‘locating’ or the status of being ‘locative’ can become a topic of practice. These practices include building wireless networks in particular places, finding out what wireless nodes are present in a particular place, constructing databases of wireless networks, registering Wi-Fi nodes on Web-based wireless network or ‘node’ databases, annotating access points on maps, and modifying wireless hardware […]. These practices are not necessarily artistically or creatively very interesting. In some of the cases I discuss, these practices are very mundane or explicitly commercial. However I see these mundane practices involving materials, things, and images as potentially interesting material precisely because they are deeply imbued with effort, struggle and obstruction that link logics of commercial exchange and technosocial praxis” (Mackenzie 2010: 128).

Mackenzie goes on to discuss locative Wi-Fi initiatives (art projects and commercial databases) as a way of digging further into his central problematic of what is the wireless experience. The ‘practices’ he looks at need to be ‘mundane’ in order to work and in order for Mackenzie to make use of them. They need to be mundane in order to function as a black box, a transparent object so everyday that its enfoldings are unvisible. The commercial databases need to be so seamlessly everyday that their existence through mobile Apps or as APIs to social networks becomes transparent to the user and so the locative advertising (networked advertising as Mackenzie calls it (p 132)) can function. If the practice-database was ‘interesting’, was in the foreground, it would become the object of consumer attention rather than the field on which the adverts and data mining can happen.Similarly for activist or art projects, the WiFi map or image must be made to withdraw from views so that the meta-critique or practice/intervention can come forward.

These practices are interesting to Mackenzie precisely because they are mundane. Their everydayness allows him to work towards an account of ‘wirelessness’ as opposed to just the wireless network. His interest is in accounting for the experience of ‘acting wirelessly’. It is the “disjunctive (what is not connected) and conjunctive (what is somehow connected) relations, and [how wirelessness] develops intermediate pathways or rapport between them” (p 141) that is his focus. The more mundane the practice appears, the more those pathways are apparent. Paradoxically, the more transparent, the more visible.

If the Wi-Fi database practices had been more “interesting”, more present and visible, the “acting wirelessly’ practices that they set in motion, the disjunctions and conjunctions would have been less accessible. It is the everyday mundanity of the material objects in Daniel Miller’s street{Miller 2008} that opens up the relations of materiality, subjectivity and power. The “patron saint of mediocrity” Salieri’s music is perhaps a more fruitful way into the 18th century assemblage of power, politics and patronage than that of his more interesting compatriot. It is in the mundane practices, the black boxes that the most powerful alliances and translations appear.

My “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” (practice) strives to be mundane. It is deliberately as close to the swarm of imagining devices  at work in the real world as possible. It uses off-the-shelf components: a consumer camera (a Canon S95); a consumer WiFi SD card (Eye-Fi X2 Pro); consumer Wi-Fi networks, software and hardware; public social networking services (Flickr, Phanfare, Twitpic); standard web hosting package (Solarhosting); standard web technology-based viewer (HTML, CSS, Javascript) and of course standard protocols. It is not that these components are all open source. Some are proprietary and some cost money. The point is that these components are available to anyone (sic) and indeed are used by many people who do not consider themselves using a “digital imag(in)ing apparatus”. Every day someone is constructing their apparatus as they “take a picture and share it”. It is the position of these and my apparatus as a ‘black box’, an everyday, mundane events that is important. It is this that gives the alliances with Google, Facebook, Apple and MI5 their power. It is this that sets in motions relations of surveillance, sousveillance, (Bakir 2010) and activism (Hands 2010).

If I had built an ‘interesting’ apparatus, perhaps one built around hacked code or circuit-bent hardware (Hertz and Parikka 2010), I could still have traced the workings of protocol, I could still have used RAW to counterpoint the visibility and withdrawal of jpeg and pushed jpeg until it failed to work, until its becoming as event stalled and became unvisible. The event of my practices would still have potentially opened the jpeg ‘black box’ and problematised the technosocial relations and alliances in play. What such an interesting apparatus would not have done though is brought the rest of the swarm into the practice. A central concern in my project is the way into which the jpeg protocol is enfolded in the swarm of everyday imaging practices, devices and apparatuses – mobile phone cameras and Google searches, Facebook ‘likes’ and Flickr contacts. Every imaging practice in the swarm – every iPhone imaging, every search, embedding and linking that happens is an instantiation of jpeg and an event that can open the black box. My apparatus, as just one among many, does that work. So do the other apparatuses – whether that is read as such or not. If my apparatus had been extra-ordinary or interesting it would have said that “jpeg is interesting. It is special. It is out of the ordinary”. Whereas: “jpeg is ordinary, everyday and mundane” and therein lies its power.

  • Bakir, V., 2010, Sousveillance, Media And Strategic Political Communication: Iraq, USA, UK, Continuum, New York.
  • Hands, J., 2010, A Is For Activism: Dissent, Resitance And Rebellion In A Digital Culture, Pluto, London.
  • Hertz, G. & Parikka, J., 2010, Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology Into An Art Method. Vilèm Flusser Theory Award 2010, .
  • Mackenzie, A., 2010, Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism In Network Cultures, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass..
  • Miller, D., 2008, The Comfort Of Things, Polity, Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA.

Photography not photographs: apparatus as event

As my work has developed from taking photographs, through developing photographic installations in the form of mash-ups and interfaces to building a “camera”, it has become clearer that my work is about photography not photographs. To take such a position as an analyst is one thing. To do so as an ‘artist’ is another. To say one is interested in studying the practice not the texts is legitimate. To say one’s practice is the imaging not the image is quote another.

What I would argue is that, in the vein of conceptual art, the practice of conceptualising photography or imag(in)ing can make a claim to be ‘art’. Again this is not a radical step. Within the field of practice-research, the practice (as opposed to the product) is seen as a valid object in itself. Curation, choreography, performance are as legitimate as the image or the text as creative works appropriate for assessment. I would argue however that these practices inevitably have a product. The product may not be the aim but it does not get in the way of the practice-research that leads up to it.

My argument is that when looking at jpeg as a process, an occasion, an object-actant that withdraws from view but is powerfully enfolded in alliances and scopic relations, the product does get in the way. To engage in a practice that produces images (mine or a montage of others) would be to not only to display jpeg/JFIFs or at least their realisation in ink or pixels, as in the work of Thomas Ruff (2009), but also to call on the practice-research to focus on images rather than processes of imaging. To produce an installation such as a mashup would be to  be to focus on the traces of protocol’s work of encoding and decoding and its role in sharing and searching but would also drive the practice-research into exploring where protocol works rather than where it breaks down, the limits of its alliances, the edges of its process and becoming. As I have sought to argue, it is when the black box is pushed to its limits that it breaks apart and the alliances and processes become most evident. Practice-research is about finding the moments of failure, of un-becoming perhaps, that can show the limits of protocol. To engage in a practice that issues in a product, no matter how dynamic or fluid, has implications for the research questions and so the  ‘answers’.

The issue then becomes what sort of practice-without-product can one engage in that enables that liminality, that can focus on the fragmentary and complex nature of processual objects and account for becoming in the nature of actant alliances? More concretely in terms of a practice-research PhD, particularly a funded one, what do I ‘hand in’? My recent thinking has been around the ‘scopic apparatus’ as a space of fragmentation, failure and complexity. This ‘apparatus’ has enabled me to push protocol to open up the questions of process, actants, becoming, alliances and enfoldings in play within our scopic regime. The process/practice of conceptualising the ‘apparatus’, building in the failures and fragmentations, has been the site of practice-research. But what happens if I ‘build’ and submit the apparatus?

Were I to build a camera in the traditional sense of constructing a box, perhaps adding a lens or a pinhole, maybe adding mirrors and gears – this would be deemed to be a creative or at least craft practice. Were I to update that and ‘circuit bend’ a digital device or hack and solder a gadget – that too would happily carry the label ‘creative’. Were I to fabricate an ‘installation’ where a visitor could experience an apparatus in the gallery or the community centre – there would be a ‘work’. Were I even to create a website that somehow foregrounded imaging (the sort of App I originally set out to build) – there would be a product-practice. Such apparatuses may make the moment of submission easier but, as products, they would drive the practice-research away from its focus on becoming, alliances, occasions and events.

The “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” I am exploring cannot be a ‘thing’. It is the hardware, software, network relations and processes. It is the gaps (the hyphen maybe) between those technologies and actants. When my digital camera, WiFi card, router, server, webpage assemblage is realised, when the button is pressed and jpeg and other software and protocols do their work, particular actant-network relations are set in process, a certain occasion “becomes and perishes” (Whitehead 1967: 204), jpeg flashes into life and alliance. It works (rendering visible) and fails (rendering unvisible).

I am engaged in two practices: the creation of the apparatus and its use. Both must be seen as processes-without-products. In the first practice, the envisioning and ‘creation’ of the apparatus, the practice, is the bringing together of off-the-shelf components – the camera, card, router, software, server, network etc. I am not doing anything new here. This actant-network already exists in countless configurations every time someone takes a photo and upload it to a social network for instance. My practice is simply envisioning it in a particular context (practice-research PhD). The important thing is the practice of envisioning or imag(in)ing, not the product established. The second practice is the running of the apparatus, not the technology it runs on or any image even montage it produces. It is in the envisioning and running that protocol’s status as event, as actant within networks, is made apparent. It is when the light-as -data is made visible and unvisble or when the network fails that protocol appears as most vivid. The products – any camera or image created are purely secondary.

The “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” is best thought of as an event. This is not a ‘performance’ (again with that emphasis on product) but a moment of becoming in a Whiteheadian sense. The important thing here is the emphasis on process, on becoming and on perishing. 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-object) 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.

If I was happy to ‘hand in’ a device, an App, a website or even a plan for a performance, my practice-research would be about creating an object not an event. It would be about looking to pin down relations and map connections and effects. It would be establishing coherency not fragmentation, success not failure. It is only when protocol is pushed to failure that its alliances, becoming and power appear. It is this ‘failure’ that I argue is the power of practice-hyphen-research. It is the willingness of the practice-research method to embrace fragmentation, to privilege process over product, liminal failure over stable workings, that allows it to explore actant-networks and actant-event-objects that withdraw from view.

  • Ruff, T., 2009, Jpegs, Aperture Foundation, Inc, New York, NY.
  • Whitehead, A.N., 1967, Adventures Of Ideas, Free Press, New York.

Kittler: software’s materiality

For Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Kittler “refuses to betray the hardware for something delusional conjured up by the software” (2010: 118). He is of course right to draw out Kittler’s media archaeological emphasis on the materiality of media objects and object-relations. Like Crary, Friedberg, Zielinksi and Kirschenbaum, Kittler’s project is one of reclaiming the material apparatuses as objects not only worthy of study but also as ontologically significant – actants in their own right and in their own relations. Although these writers do not talk of Actor-Network Theory, speculative realism or Object Oriented Philosophy per se, they are of a mind with those perspectives in terms of their willingness to take object-apparatuses seriously within a flat ontology and to trace the regimes of visuality and governmentality as enfolded with those object-apparatuses.

Where one can perhaps expand on Kittler’s account is treating software (and protocol) in the same way. Moving on from addressing software as just “burnt into silicon” (Kittler 1997: 150), as enfolded within the material apparatus, to approaching it as a material actant itself is not to stray from a materialist account into some idealist, virtual or caricatured hyperreal view of data simulacra. Rather it is to analyse software in its specificity, to understand that it can withdraw from view but still be powerful; to embrace its working through becoming as evidence of its materiality. It is to identify another key actant in the network.

In his provocatively titled There is no Software Kittler says:

“The criminal law, at least in Germany, has recently abandoned the very concept of software as a mental property; instead, it defined software as a necessarily material thing. The high court’s reasoning, according to which without the correspondent electrical charges in silicon circuitry no computer program would ever run, can already illustrate the fact that the virtual undecidability between software and hardware follows by no means, as system theorists would probably like to believe, from a simple variation of observation points. On the contrary, there are good grounds to assume the indispensability and, consequently, the priority of hardware in general” (Kittler 1995).

Here software (for German law or Kittler) is not material in and of itself, it is a ‘material thing’ because of the ‘priority of hardware’ wherein it gets its existence. Later in the same article he says: “This all-important property of being programmable has, in all evidence, nothing to do with software; it is an exclusive feature of hardware, more or less suited as it is to house some notation system”. A more object-oriented, processual approach however would see software as not secondary to (or even a dangerous supplement to) hardware.

The problem of pinning down protocol within software is clear evidence that it has its own existence. While it is possible perhaps to argue that a word processing package has its existence and certainly its use value in terms of its location within hardware, the same cannot be said of a protocol or a standard  that while instantiated within particular software packages and hardware configurations – or indeed my digital imag(in)ing apparatus – has a power full location  (a becoming) in the network (in an ANT rather than purely technical sense).

  • Kittler, F 1995, There is No Software, Ctheory. net. Retrieved February 14, 2011,  from http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74
  • Kittler, F., 1997, Literature Media Information Systems, Johnston, J. ed. OAP, Amsterdam.
  • Winthrop-Young, G., 2010, Kittler And The Media, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.

The App in apparatus

Mobile phone cameras are examples of “digital imag(in)ing apparatuses”. They combine the various components, material and immaterial, hardware and software in a particular apparatus. The phone apparatus also optionally connects with network components as the phone connects to WiFi or 3G networks. It can also connect with (form alliances with) the social web by ‘sharing’ or uploading the image files the apparatus creates.

The jpeg protocol is a key actant within this network, serving to compress and encode the data coming from the CCD and render it admissible and accessible. This is common to all such apparatuses but the emerging ‘app economy’ adds not only new alliance issues but also new imaging and ontological questions.

Photography apps, whether for taking, manipulating or archiving and sharing images, set up and work across new alliances. The digital imag(in)ing apparatus is brought into alignment with an ecosystem of small and large scale programmers, companies, businesses and business strategies as well as connecting in new ways with Apple or Google businesses as they seek to develop, own and control the app economy.

The app as an instantiation of particular alliances constitutes particular sets of relations and processes. As well as locating imaging within the alliances common to any protocol-driven imaging process, its event is particular to mobile imagining practices, mobile WiFi and 3G networks and relations.

The app also configures the software event in particular ways. By combining encoding with particular forms of post processing (through filters and what in Photoshop are called ‘actions’ e.g. creation of a border), the app moves beyond simply writing data to the card according to particular protocol standards and software-defined standards of what is colour balance, gamma etc. The software that constitutes the app applies particular algorithms to the data (presented as filters or in the case of Apps like Hipstamatic, ‘films’ and ‘lenses’) that encode particular effects into the data as it is written as a jpeg/JFIF image file.

For some there are ethical issues in play here. When a New York Times photographer used an App while on assignment, debate raged as to whether the software effects – applied between pressing the button and ‘seeing the image’ i.e. within the digital imag(in)ing pipeline – constituted the same sort of ethical problematic that post-processing or ‘manipulating in Photoshop offers. For some the issue is the same, a perceived loss of some more fundamental indexical connection that ‘pure’ digital imaging (even with a phone) can carry. The work of software in aestheticising the image and the imagining is a step beyond photography and particularly photo-journalism. A similar set of questions could be raised about the role of App software in terms of authorship. When an imaging artists chooses and uses particular Photoshop filters arguably she is making creative choices. When software does it, is that an abdication of authorial intent?

The App depends on protocol. Without the common standard and interoperability of jpeg, the App could of course encode and render light-as-data-as-image-as-manipulated image, but it would be unvisble and unsharable.

Tweets for the week :: 2011-02-20

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What a perfomance

The demonstration of the “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” is more than a final flourish or a show-and-tell, it is an integral part of the project. In some ways the ‘demonstration’ is a necessary part of the apparatus, not only as a proof of concept, but also as a critical component in the network I am setting up.

The demonstration of the working of the “digital imag(in)ing apparatus” is at one scale a performance. The stream of imag(in)ings that appear and disappear, that are visible and unvisible, are particularly present as the apparatus works before its ‘audience’. Of course the presence of the particular actants, their status as ‘occasions’ in the moment of becoming is the central theme of the apparatus. It is designed to explore the particular ways in which jpeg is present and absent within the digital imag(in)ing pipeline.  But those actants take on a particular presence as the apparatus works in reality as opposed to the way it works in the ‘diagram’. This is not just in terms of how the audience perceives or relates to those actants, but also how they articulate the viewer or the “superject” in Whitehead’s terms. In the space of the demonstration, particular actant network relations are set in motion that reconfigure the network and position the actants as different ‘occasions’ or moments of becoming.

This is a performance in the sense of a practice. Not only my practices, but also that of the other actants within the apparatus. It is a making visible of the moments of becoming that are the ‘nature’ of the actants in play. This staged performance echoes the countless similar performances that other digital imag(in)ing apparatuses make every day across the Live Web as camera buttons are pressed, CCDs register light and convert it to electrical signals that software and protocols encode in particular formats (usually jpeg/JFIF) and then write to a memory device; as that data is passed across local area and wide area networks and the Internet through WiFi and wired networks; as that data is decoded as imag(in)ings and enfolded into social and media relations and ecologies.

My ‘performance’ is a deliberate act of imag(in)ing, making those relations present. But it is also an integral part of the digital imag(in)ing apparatus. Without that performance that I do and that countless other imagers do every day, the digital imag(in)ing pipeline would not work, the imaging and imagining relations would not work and the actant-network would have a different configuration. The moments of becoming, the actant as occasion would be different and so the “societies” in play (in Whitehead’s terms) would be different.

My digital imag(in)ing apparatus is the material components (actant-occasions), the immaterial ones and the practice-performance actant-occasions. The apparatus is camera, software, interface and practice. To submit the thesis, the diagram and even the hardware/software device without submitting the practice would be incomplete.