JPEG: the quadruple object
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Abstract
The thesis, together with its practice-research works, presents an object-oriented
perspective on the JPEG standard. Using the object-oriented
philosophy of Graham Harman as a theoretical and also practical starting
point, the thesis looks to provide an account of the JPEG digital object and
its enfolding within the governmental scopic regime. The thesis looks to
move beyond accounts of digital objects and protocols within software
studies that position the object in terms of issues of relationality,
processuality and potentiality. From an object-oriented point of view, the
digital object must be seen as exceeding its relations, as actual, present and
holding nothing in reserve. The thesis presents an account of JPEG starting
from that position as well as an object-oriented account of JPEG’s position
within the distributed, governmental scopic regime via an analysis of
Facebook’s Timeline, tagging and Haystack systems.
As part of a practice-research project, the author looked to use that
perspective within photographic and broader imaging practices as a spur to
new work and also as a “laboratory” to explore Harman’s framework. The
thesis presents the findings of those “experiments” in the form of a report
alongside practice-research eBooks. These works were not designed to be
illustrations of the theory, nor works to be “analysed”. Rather, following the
lead of Ian Bogost and Mark Amerika, they were designed to be
“philosophical works” in the sense of works that “did” philosophy