Back when the sky was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel (Gibson, Neuromancer) and ‘cyberspace’ was the new technicolor, the virtual stood in opposition to the material. The two were different. The former was insubstantial, imperceptible and immaterial. Flexible and playful. The latter was determined and structural, historical and base. This was Tron vs Blackstuff.

Later with the birth of software studies, code, algorithms and protocol were elevated as worthy of attention. Software art made them cultural and auratic. Whether they were being deconstructed as ideological or power-full in Fuller’s account of Word or constructed as problematic in Manovich’s identification of the ‘new media object’, they were still within the discourse of the virtual, the immaterial maybe even the ethereal. Of course this is not to say that those critiques we’re not concerned with the real and the material. Software studies and software art has a long history of radical critique and intervention, rather the point is to draw attention to the analytical separation between the material and the immaterial. The focus on software and code was an attempt to uncover a new determinant or player in that material reality.

In Materiality, Miller identifies Keane, Kucher and Thrift’s contributions to the collection as ‘hammering nails in the coffin’ of the opposition between humanity and materiality. The two cannot be separated. To use an image from complexity theory, they are infolded. The immaterial and the material are locked together: the image of Christ and the church’s wealth and power. (Goody); the brand and the sweatshop or music download site (cf Lash and Urry’s Global Culture Industry).

The code in Microsoft Word does not determine or preexist the secretary’s work or the power relations in the office. The protocols of financial derivatives are not the immaterial base for traders’ bonuses or public sector redundancies. To position them as such is, following the anthropologists’ accounts to recreate religious and ascetic accounts that privilege the immaterial,  the virtual, the divine. The code object and the subject position, commodities and real world material relations are infolded as simultaneously material and immaterial.

Software is clearly a commodity, bought, sold, stolen. It is material not only as the CD and as bits in memory but as it is enfolded in business practices and social relations – Latour’s alliances. Even protocol can be seen as a commodity open or closed source, proprietary or not. But it is the fact that code and protocol are simultaneously material and immaterial (incorporeal-material in the Deleuzian sense as Parikka discusses in relation to software art) that is interesting and productive and that means we need an object-oriented ontology to look at them.

Protocol is also immaterial. My experiments that attempt to ‘chase protocol’ indicate that it cannot be located in the same way that a particular line of C++ can. In Heidegger’s terms it withdraws from view. In order to do what it does in terms of setting in motion particular scopic practices, constituting a particular scopic apparatus it has to be simultaneously material and immaterial. It has to be material in order to forge alliances with industry and social actants. It has to be immaterial in order to be the sort of transparent black box/tool that can function as scopic apparatus.

While it is not difficult to approach protocol from an object-oriented perspective, following Latour’s Irreductions to understand it as an actant enfolded in alliances and translations, actively doing things in the world, it is perhaps more difficult to imag(in)e it as material.

Miller’s discussion of the Internet in his chapter on Media: Immaterial Culture and Applied Anthropology in Stuff (Ch4) highlights the problem. He discusses his research on mobile phone use and argues for media being seen as more than a means to an end (p132), but rather as a cultural genre (p114). Here the material phone or the immaterial phone call/text conversation is the object of study and in his terms an active player in constituting subject and object relations. In this short chapter he does not discuss the position of software or protocol but does present a definition of ‘The Internet’ as: “a term we use to consolidate genres of usage that are linked through online access”. Having positioned what is, in reality, a complex network of infolded standards, protocols and code built on them, he then use the ‘Internet’ as almost a background to his material commentary. “It’s not that Trinidanians use the Internet, or that the Internet creates Trinidanians. It’s more that the Trinidanian Internet is something distinct from all other Internets and makes the Trinidanian who uses the Internet something beyond previous forms of being Trinidanian” (p118). It is not just this potentially essentialising of complex networks (not just in the technical sense but in the ontological sense) that is problematic. Rather it is the avoidance of the question of what is material about the Internet and protocol?

You can’t hold protocol. You can’t even ‘see’ it like you can with the code of a particular programme. As I will argue in a paper due to be presented at the ASCA International Workshop ‘Practicing Theory’ in Amsterdam, March 2011 (PDF 8MB. Sorry it’s got imag(in)ings embedded!), one is left ‘chasing protocol’, tracing its effects across a scopic regime but unable to pin it down. But that doesn’t mean it is not real and material.

Others are exploring aspects of immateriality. Recent work on how (immaterial) finance theory relates to (material) realities in the money markets and the world economy (cf Donald MacKenzie on arbitrage; Miller and Carrier on ‘virtualism’ and Miyazaki on the ‘materialization of finance theory’) shows not only the relation between theory and object of analysis (cf John Law) but also how it is possible to study the immaterial. The traders enfolded their theories and the complex immaterial protocols of securitisation, derivatives and arbitrage into their material practices and material objects affected by those practices. The protocols of the money markets and those of digital imaging have real effects in the world (particularly, as with all black boxes, when they fail) yet they are immaterial

Just as (immaterial) jpeg becomes materialized in scopic practices and texts (images and mashups), so (immaterial) financial protocols and objects become materialised in trades, crashes, commodities and home repossessions. One might not be able to pin down the immaterial but one can trace its work. That tracing shows that the immaterial is not separate from, prior to or dependent on the material but rather is enfolded in it.

There’s a lot of stuff on Facebook. Facebook marketing director Randi Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg’s sister) tweeted that 750 million images/imaginings were uploaded over the New Year’s weekend. This compares with statistics from July 2010 that showed 100 million photos per day. In comparison the 5 billionth Flickr image was uploaded in September 2010. At the rate Facebook was being used to imagine over the holdiays, it would surpass that in a week or two.

Jpeg enables, possibly even encourages this expansion. As a compression standard it allows more images per memory card, quicker uploads and sharing as well as the potential for tagging and geolocative metadata and consequently data-mining and tracing.

These jpeg-enabled image-objects are stuff in people’s lives, relations and spaces. Anna Reading has talked of how they relate to digital memory and John Urry and Shaun Moores have drawn attention to mobile media and mobilities and Miller’s discussion of Stuff explores the position of digital/virtual media objects. But there is another side to this story.

750,000,000 is a lot of image-stuff but also a lot of ‘stuffing’ (if you’ll forgive the seasonal pun). That’s a lot of people imag(in)ing and streaming those images across and through their social spaces and relationships. Perhaps one difference between Facebook and Flickr is that Facebook imag(in)ing, as part of more diffuse social media practices and content relationships, is more domestic, informal imaging than the deliberate ‘photographing’ practice of Flickr’n. If Flickr is full of photographers, perhaps Facebook is full of ‘imagers’, not talking about shutter speeds and HDR but about parties and babies. What is clear is that imag(in)ing is increasing. The expansion of Twitter into multimedia is further evidence of a demand for imaging spaces and practices. Zuckerberg does not breakdown how many users were uploading or sharing those 750m imag(in)ings but this practice is clearly a fully integrated part of ‘Facebooking’.

This could of course have happened without jpeg. If Gif or PNG or SVG had enfolded itself in alliances with browser standards, social network APIs and Nikon and Apple production practices, maybe the same practices and imag(in)ings would have appeared, but they didn’t. Locked in like VHS rather than Betamax, jpeg is the transparent standard through which we imag(in)e. The jpeg protocol needs to be seen as setting practices as well as images in motion (this is at the heart of my use of imag(in)ing as a concept).

Daniel Miller is quite clear: “nowhere in this volume [Stuff] will you find any attempt at a definition of that term… Stuff as a term serves just fine” (pp1-2). He explores whether an email or fashion can be seen as ‘stuff’ but is more concerned with tracing how stuff works rather than pinning it down. He says his project is one of ‘extreme particularism’ (p21). (Perhaps, picking up on John Law’s call for a modest sociology, one could advocate an ‘extreme parochialism’.) By looking at the small and the intimate he finds ways into the general. This is not a reductionism or a form of foundationalism. Just as in object-oriented philosophy, the universal and the particular are inseparable. “I desire to be an extremist,” he says, a position which represents, “a commitment to keep in touch simultaneously with the extremes of universalism and particularism in modern life” (p9).

This is the importance of ‘stuff’, a concept that partly because of the connotations of inanity, allows us to concentrate on the specific, local workings of the material (or in terms of software and protocol, the immaterial) without recourse to the ‘depth ontology’ (p16) of semiotic models. Rather, just like all object-oriented approaches, one is able to look at how the particular (clothing/protocol) fashions relations at the particular and the universal ‘levels’ (sic). As Miller says: “In many respects stuff actually creates us in the first place” (p10).

This relationship between the particular and the universal is at the heart of my exploration of jpeg. The jpeg (particular) and the scopic regime (universal) must be held simultaneously if we are to address distributed imag(in)ing. This is not a matter of oscillating between the macro and the micro, let alone looking to position one pole as the determinant or foundation. Rather it is to address the relationship between the jpeg-stuff and the distributed scopic regime as a fractal relationship where each is enfolded and infolded in practice and needs to be similarly addressed in terms of our analysis.

Miller’s embracing of the common language of ‘stuff’ opens up those folds by opening up the subject-object, object-thing terminology. Miller does this not to prove some theoretical or philosophical point but to concentrate on the empathy and understanding. As he says: “The aim of anthropology [even an anthropology of protocol] is to take any such pure, clean philosophy and drag it back down to the valley, to the muddy terrain of particularity and diversity” (p41).

Google’s servers are full of rags ‘n refuse. So are Yahoo’s, Twitter’s and Facebook’s. Across the Live Web we leave behind and they hoover up. They stockpile our refuse in their server farms like an eccentric recluse stockpiling New York Times in his apartment. News both mainstream and citizen, snapshots and doodles, post-it notes and birthday cards, messages and reminders, diary entries and details piled high. Dumped in databases just as the eccentric piles information on top of mementos, rubbish on top of value, the personal on top of the social.

When the eccentric dies the authorities come in to sort through the rags ‘n refuse as Jane Bennett has discussed in terms of her study of vibrant matter. They dig tunnels through the detritus, looking for bodies, for details, for meaning, for value. They trace the connections and try to put together a story. Eventually they connect enough to create a governmental record, a subject able to be filed, told, positioned. That subject is valuable. As a citizen, the eccentric can be a part of a society subject to it’s disciplines and discourses. A body.

Google’s algorithms and those of the other database ‘owners’ also dig through detritus. They trace the connections and stories through our e-rags ‘n refuse, our archives. They calculate and draw out the recommendations, ‘friendships’ and ‘likes’ that we have stockpiled and forgotten. Their data tunnels (whether they sell them on or not) are the value among the rags ‘n refuse. They tell stories of new demographics and new markets. They unpick ABC1s and remake them as ‘people who bought this also…’ or cycling fans who also read object-oriented philosophy. Every detail or action left behind, every link followed or sent, every search and connection can become part of new data meanings, practice and (governmental) relations.

We are repositioned as data creators and users, bio-subjects with data bodies that can be positioned within data governmentality, data disciplines, data control societies (cf Deleuze). IDs, membership numbers, loyalty members, the more data traces we leave the more we create our data homes and subject positions within state and Google governmental regimes.

Those algorithms that dig through the rags ‘n refuse are ‘intelligent’. They learn. They have a form of agency as object-actants in economic as well as data alliances. They generate ‘meaning’ and subjects. They generate other objects as they work, as they ‘do things’ in their world, the data refuse apartments we create.

In his contribution to the catalogue for the ‘Making Things Public’ exhibition, Latour talks of “the thin felt pen used by draughtsmen to imagine new landscapes”. Here the draughtsman and his object do more than draw. The object does more than act as the channel for his ‘creativity’ or ‘message’. The pen is an active player in the creation of the work. The alliance between the pen-object and the draughtsman-object establishes both man (sic) and machine as active. The tool ‘does things’ not simply because it it is wielded by an artist but because it is enfolded in relations with that artist-object, the business of architecture, the studio, the contract commissioning the design and countless other black boxes within the actor-network.

And that alliance is creative, not just in the sense that the draughtsman might see his drawings or work as creative, but in the broader ontological sense captured in Latour’s use of the word ‘imagine’. The plans that emerge from the pen-draughtsman alliance do not just create an illusion or a picture but an imaginary. Whether the building is ever built or not the imaginary is in play, a new object and set of object relations has been set in motion. Drawing on Anderson and Taylor’s ideas of the imagined community which Lillie Chouliariki discusses in relation to spectatorship, imagining as a practice is deeply political, power-full and real. This is not a dream but the active construction of new relations and ways of seeing. It is not just that a plan for a new landscape creates a new visual sign or ideology or even that it is enfolded in the complex relations of planning, building, sustainability etc. The act of imag(in)ing with and through the pen-object brings into play (maybe even ‘existence’) a new imaginary that changes the network. All other imaginaries now inevitably relate to it. New alliances and translations are in play. New traces of power cross those relations. It is not possible to configure the semiotic, ideological, political landscape in quite the same way – even if the physical landscape is never changed by the imaginary.

“The standard used by photographers to imag(in)e 2012”. The jpeg protocol, like the felt pen is a tool, used by photographers, software designers and internet businesses. But like the pen it is an object, an active actant working in the actor-network of the new distributed scopic regime. It sets up the conditions of possibility for imaging and imagining (imag(in)ing) in terms of flexibility and interoperability. But is is not the passive tool of the imager, the programmer or the web service. Rather it is an active player in setting scopic practices, texts and relations in motion. The traces of those relations are imaginaries brought into play (maybe even ‘existence’) that change the network. The protocol should not be seen as (technologically) determining those imaginaries and relations because the protocol should not be caricatured as a ‘technology’. Rather it should be seen as a multi-dimensional object.