For many commentators, Carry’s work is primarily about the subject. Insofar as Crary’s target is the “observer”, “one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations” (Crary 2001: 6), they are of course correct. For Crary, technology is not a separate realm but an element in the matrix of subjectification, biopower and governmentality.

For critics such as Barry Katz however, “the significance of this thesis […] is to suggest that the history of technology – in this case technologies of visual representation – may be recast as the study of ‘a new arrangement of knowledge about the body and the constitutive relation of that knowledge to social power’ (Crary 2001: 17)“ (Katz 1992: 207). Such a reading arguably makes the scopic technologies and apparatuses Crary explores into at best background and at worst functionalist components of biopower. Crary however says: “what determines vision at any given historical moment is not some deep structure, economic base, or worldview, but rather the functioning of a collective assemblage of disparate parts on a single social surface. “It may even be necessary to consider the observer as a distribution of events located in different places” (Crary 2001: 6). It is this assemblage, the complex enfolding of subjectivity and technology, that he is looking to unpack. His history is not one of “the observer” as opposed to “technology” but rather observer-technologies.

Thomas Prasch blankly states that: “Crary does not understand history” (1992: 234) accusing him of generalisations and even cliches. My concern is not to defend Crary’s historical accuracy but to point out a tendency in reading Crary that separates his account of  technology from his argument about subjectivity and power. Although Prasch is right to demand that an account of scopic apparatuses includes: “the use of the new techniques of vision by industrialists […] popular responses to the new visual toys, and […]the diffusion of new ideas about vision beyond laboratories” (p 234), for this critic too the “apparatus” is a distinct part of Crary’s analysis rather than an enfolded component. Prasch says: “Crary then turns to the range of mechanical devices (from thaumatropes to stereoscopes) developed for the scientific study of vision. A common theme unified these experiments…” (p 233). Here an account of the devices is a “turn” in the analysis and the raw material for the “real” argument that Prasch critiques.

Part of this problem with Crary’s work may be his tendency, notably in Suspensions of Perception (2001) to include works of art in his assemblage. Whether it is Turner’s late work in relation to the physiological investigations of Gustav Flechner or Seurat and “the new retinal opticality in the emergent structures of commodification” (Summers 2001: 158), Crary’s constellation of objects (Crary 2001: 5) can be read as a willingness to complexify the assemblage of objects and widening the concept of the scopic and the apparatus, or generalising and drawing links in the service of a metanarrative of governmental power.

Crary seeks to keep the specifics of the scopic technologies enfolded in his broader critique but perhaps his tendency to address them as metaphors  undermines this, leaving his critics free to separate the two and position devices/technologies/apparatuses as a form of supplement. The Camera Obscura was clearly used as a metaphor “by Locke, Descartes, Leibniz and others” (Crary 2001: 292) (as well as by Jay and Crary) but it also existed as a material technology, a present thing in the world, an object. The governmental relations that Crary addresses (the alliances we might term them) worked through the material as well as the metaphoric.

• Crary, J., 1990, Techniques Of The Observer: On Vision And Modernity In The Nineteenth Century, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Crary, J., 2001, Suspensions Of Perception : Attention, Spectacle, And Modern Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass..
• Katz, B., 1992, Review: Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century by Jonathan Crary, Technology and Culture, 33(1), pp. 206-7.
• Prasch, T., 1992, Review: Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, by Jonathan Crary, Victorian Studies, 35(2), pp. 233-4.
• Summers, D., 2001, Review: Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture by Jonathan Crary, The Art Bulletin, 83(1), pp. 157-61.

Jonathan Crary is interested in the history of visuality and scopic apparatuses but in some ways he is equally interested in the ways in which that story has been told, in its periodisation. For Crary, as for Martin Jay, the tendency to homogenise or render linear regimes or technologies not only needs to be challenged but can, in itself, illuminate the regime under investigation. For Crary as for Jay, discourses of progress, optical fidelity or accuracy, verisimilitude and modernity, as they have helped to periodise histories of vision, visuality and visual technologies, need to be unpicked not just in terms of accuracy but also in terms of their disciplinary power – the power to construct a “modern scopic regime” or a “camera” as well as an “observer” or a “photographed”. Where Jay offers a way of exploring overlapping regimes, discontinuities and enfolded ways of seeing and imag(in)ing, so Crary adds an extra dimension by exploring the particular technologies of vision through which those regimes are instantiated. In the terms with which I am working, the ways in which scopic-technological objects  become the sort of transparent, everyday ‘black boxes’ which are powerfully enfolded in the sort of political, cultural, artistic and commercial alliances Jay and Crary map. Crary adds the technological-object element to Jay’s map of the scopic regime.

In Techniques of the Observer, (1990), Crary’s aim is to account for how the “camera obscura model of vision… collapsed in the early nineteenth century when it was replaced by radically different notions of what an observer was and of what constituted vision” (Crary 1988: 30). It is this power full enfolding of the subject position of observer, discourses of vision and scopic technologies which is Crary’s target. Crary characterises his work as around the “problem of the observer [which] is the field on which vision in history can be said to materialize, to become itself visible” (1990: 5). He maps this field in terms of the apparatuses that the subject uses and is, to some extent, constructed by. Crary is keen to avoid “mystifying [the visual] by recourse to technological explanations” (1990: 2) but without an exploration of the instantiation of material apparatuses in specific historical conjunctures, he argues, that problem of the observer cannot be traced. Crary discusses the Camera Obscura, the Zootrope, the Phenakistiscope, the Magic Lantern and the Kaleidoscope not for their own sake but because of how they were enfolded in and constitutive of the sort of governmental scopic relations that John Tagg also explored in terms of photography (1992, 1993, 2009). The technological and discursive discontinuities that characterise the assemblage or media ecology under investigation must include, but not be reduced to, the specifics of the apparatuses through which they work.

For Crary the scopic and the scopic apparatus are only one dimension of the workings of power. Alongside Tagg, Crary is indebted to the Foucault of Discipline and Punish. For both, vision is lodged in the body, “a condition of possibility both for the artistic experimentation of modernism and for new form of domination, for what Foucault calls the ‘technology of individuals’ (Foucault 1979: 225)” (Crary 1988: 43). But the “scopic” just as “technology” must not be allowed to be the only actant on the stage. “I do not believe that exclusively visual concepts such as ‘the gaze’ or ‘beholding; are in themselves valuable objects of historical explanation,” Crary argues (2001: 3). In his later book he uses the terms “perception” as a way of exploring how a subject has come to be defined “in more than the single-sense modality of sight, in terms also of hearing and touch and, most importantly, of irreducibly mixed modalities which, inevitably, get little or no analysis within ‘visual studies’” (p 3). Here again though he develops this account through a “constellation of objects” (p 5), material technologies and apparatuses that articulate those operations of power. What could perhaps be argued is that within that “constellation of objects” account must be made of the (im)material apparatus.

• Crary, J. 1988, Modernizing Vision, in H Foster (ed), Vision and Visuality, Bay Press, Seattle, pp. 29-50.
• Crary, J., 1990, Techniques Of The Observer: On Vision And Modernity In The Nineteenth Century, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Foucault, M., 1979, Discipline And Punish: The Birth Of The Prison, Translated by Sheridan. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.
• Tagg, J., 1992, Grounds Of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics, And The Discursive Field, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
• Tagg, J., 1993, The Burden Of Representation, Macmillan Education, Basingstoke.
• Tagg, J., 2009, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths And The Capture Of Meaning, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

One can explore protocol from a philosophical point of view. Indeed my critique of existing accounts of protocol has been that they do not explore the ontological status of the protocol object within its networks. Latour of course would take issue with this approach, one that tries to extend Actor-network theory into a philosophical project. But I would argue that such a gentle expansion of ANT adds something to the account, even if one does not go perhaps as far as Graham Harman in thinking through how that endless collection of objects can have an ontological existence outside their relations.

There is is a second way to approach protocol, one that can be seen as adding the missing material piece. A media archaeological account of the jpeg protocol as a scopic apparatus allows one to bracket off the problematic ontological status of protocol, its tendency to withdraw from view, but still hold onto its alliances. To address jpeg as a technology of vision, a material instantiation is not to simply historically contextualise or culturally locate a technology nor is it to simply find a new way of writing the history of visuality and imag(in)ing. Rather the work of Crary, Friedberg, and Kittler in particular, but also Zielinski, Kirschenbaum and Gitelman, offers the sort of anti-foundationalist, non-essentialist way into the scopic apparatus that parallels the flat ontology I draw from Latour and Harman.

Many media archaeological accounts explore very concrete and material technologies. The Camera Obscura and Lanterna Magica feature regularly. These are not brought in to merely tell the story of painting, photography or cinema but rather to trace the connections (alliances perhaps) between technologies and fields of vision and regimes of visuality and governmentality.

Just as ANT and object-oriented philosophy are sometimes caricatured as apolitical, anti-structural, even neo-liberal, so these media archaeologies are sometimes positioned as either Whig histories, Foucualdian epistemic periodisations or even as technologically determinist. Just as ANT and OOP aim to explore the folded nature of objects within alliances, so media archaeologies look to explore the ways in which technologies and enfolded in practices of seeing and of governmentality. In a similar refusal to engage with foundations and essences, these accounts also explore ‘black boxes’. Where ANT/OOP approach the ontological object as deriving its existence and power from its alliances, ones that become so embedded/enfolded and everyday they become transparent (a perspective that Harman would take further by arguing for existence outside of relations); so media archaeology addresses particular technological instantiations as enfolded, sometime everyday, which when they are opened up reveal not deeper levels but more diffuse and powerful alliances.

Where I want to bring these two perspectives together is around the jpeg protocol object, a black box so everyday it withdraws from view not only ontologically but also politically (enabling corporate imaging and governmental surveillance but never fully present), a technology of vision, a scopic apparatus that sets in motion particular ways of seeing and being seen (around sharing, streaming and scraping). Through a  philosophical approach I can address protocol as an ‘object’ something with a position that can be explored and mapped, with relations that exist. I can focus on it even though it withdraws from view, cannot be seen or held or even found. With an ANT/OOP guarantee that it is as worthy of study as an atom, a dream and any other object in a Latour litany, I can move to trace its work. Through a media archaeological account of that object as (amongst other things) a scopic apparatus, I can account for one dimension of its work and locate it as a material thing, an instantiation with a particular location, politics and series of effects and affects.

When people hear that I am working on a ‘practice-research’ PhD the first question is usually what the ‘subject’ is and the second what my ‘practice’ is. It is clear from the literature around practice-research, often built around the case study (Barrett and Bolt 2010) that the “creative work”, the object is integral to practice-research’s USP, claim to legitimacy and the subjectivity of the practice-researcher.

Even those practice-research practices that include a focus on process – the development of a dance, the curating of a show, the training before an activist action still lead to a product. The process may be integral to the work and indeed to the practice-research but there is s still an ‘object’ at the end. For Judith Aston the process of developing a “multilayered associated narrative” is a key space for learning but running through that research is the expectation that Aston and her anthropologist colleague Professor Wendy James would produce a piece of work. She says: “my intention is to produce nested layers of interlinked multimedia pieces, which individually communicate discrete ideas and arguments and collectively combine to reinforce the themes discussed in the book” (2008: 47).

Anne Burke says her work exploring the Aran Islands “was concerned with two key questions: the role of photography in the assertion of ethnographic authority; and the potential of the photograph as a means of interrogating that same authority” (2008: 127). Here again the process (photography)  was enfolded in the practice but the resultant photograph-works were integral to the practice-research.

Even those practice-research projects explicitly working through a process of “experimentation” or “enquiry” tend to have a “product” as a key part of the process. Terry Flaxton’s enquiry into the experience of HD imagery features the creation of works: “I proceeded to devise six new works that explored the issues as I was beginning to see them” (2009: 128). Whether raw material for the study or, following Smith and Dean’s iterative model (2009), enfolded into the process, the work-object is at the heart of practice-research.

But not for me.

My exploration of protocol and the operations of jpeg within the “digital imag(in)ing pipeline”, avoids the product. My work is about imaging, not images. It is about a process – object relations and alliances.

As I have developed the experiments, moving away from creating particular images to creating mashups to interfaces to practices, I have found that the further I get from creating a “work” the more protocol’s operations become visible, the more the black box begins to crack. It is not only that early experiments creating augmentations and screengrabs from the stream produced images that could be mistaken for ‘jpeg’ or positioned the work within the sort of semiotic framework that Miller and Bennett warn against. It is also that the digital imag(in)ing pipeline, the operations of jpeg and other software protocols, withdraws from view. The trace is foregrounded. If, as I argue, failure makes for more powerful practice-research, then success-full image-objects mean less

The latest experiments seek to avoid a finished or even preliminary “work”. The practice is the process. Just as jpeg is a practice, an encoding and decoding within the digital imag(in)ing pipeline, my experiments in taking, processing and sharing  are my practice.

Garry Winogrand “left over 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of processed film, 3,000 rolls of contact sheets that evidently hadn’t been looked at – a total of 12,000 rolls, or 432,000 photos Winogrand took but never saw” (Resnick n.d.). Vivian Maier (http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/) too left countless rolls of film, photographic objects or works unmade. Winogrand and Maier were photographers. They wanted to produce image-work-objects. But the process was clearly as important. The wandering of the streets and the shooting was arguably as much their practice as the final image.

Maybe my practice is photography or imaging or digital processing or hacking or programming. Maybe it is some hybrid. What is becoming clear is that ‘chasing protocol’ demands a continuous tense: practice imaging not image; hacking not hack; programming not programme.

• Aston, J., 2008, Voices from the Blue Nile: Using digital media to create a multilayered associative narrative, Journal of Media Practice, 9(1), pp. 43-51.
• Barrett, E. & Bolt, B. (eds.), 2010, Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, I. B. Taurus, London; New York.
• Burke, A., 2008, Intersections On The Aran Islands: Integrating Photographic Practice And Historical Enquiry, Journal of Media Practice, 9(2), pp. 127-38.
• Flaxton, T., 2009, Time And Resolution: Experiments In High-Definition Image Making, Journal of Media Practice, 10(2&3), pp. 123-47.
• Resnick, M., n.d., Coffee and Workprints: A Workshop With Garry Winogrand, Black & White World. Retrieved February 3, 2011,  from http://www.photogs.com/bwworld/winogrand.html
• 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.