Triple O, that thought project within philosophy...
... that is continually remixed across the Blogs of Graham Harman, Tim Morton, Levi Bryant and Ian Bogost and his 'speculative realism aggregator', holds that objects are real. Whether material and physical or digital or even ideological or legal - a hard-drive, an algorithm, an image, a JPEG-encoded datafile, a Creative Commons licence and a media company and its lawyers are all in play and they are all real: all objects at play in my pocket. Here 'real' is an ontological not a mechanist or materialist issue. If they are in my remixological machine, they are real. It doesn’t matter whether they are have a physical form or not, whether they are imaginary or discursive. They are real because they have a unity and because they act. Remixing our conference app on Saturday we engaged in a form of object-oriented programming, not in the technical sense but in an ontological one. When we cut and pasted Javascript from one website and allowed it to be, and to run within, our app, when we pulled a Facebook feed, an Open Graph stream into a 'page' we worked with objects each having what OOO calls real and sensual dimensions.
OOO holds that actant-objects have withdrawn real dimensions and accessible sensual dimensions. We can never fully know an object. It always has more. It always holds something back. We may be able to map every line of code in an algorithm but we can never get at every dimension of its reality within remix, every facet of its power within and across an app. We may be able to access an image or a sentence on our Wall, to unpack its connotations but there is always more as it spins across the social graph. Heidegger had his broken hammer. In contemporary everyday remix culture, everything is broken. But although an object always withdraws, it also has an accessible dimension, a sensual side that other objects connect with. Our remixological machines (objects themselves of course) and our - or perhaps 'their' - apps are the site of these connections, choreographed by us, by algorithms or by chance.
When we added a link to the Google maps API to our conference app we connected objects, not the totality of those actants - there is always more to Google's business, technosocial assemblage and corporate object reality than we or even the NSA can connect with - but a dimension, one that connects with other code in our App, the rendering engine in our phone and human object looking for the conference centre. When we accessed the jquerymobile server at 108.161.188.209 in Studio City, California (and when any App experience does the same), we connected objects. We never accessed the totality of those objects. There was always more somehow withdrawn.
Triple O refuses to collapse these complex relations, these spatial and temporal dynamics at work in app creation and consumption, in everyday remix upwards into an account of a techno-social system or Like economy or downwards into an account of code. Neither is it willing to privilege human access or the human actant as Subject. In Bryant's words we are dealing with a democracy of objects, opening up what Galloway and Thacker call the Exploit - the possibility of reconnecting objects in critical and disruptive ways.
Tim Morton uses the term "mesh" in preference to the more common "assemblage" in his discussion of the ecological thought. Here object-actants are not parts of some bigger whole, nature, or even The Network. Drawing on the image of Indra's net and its jewels reflecting in jewels, He says, "[t]otal interconnectedness isn't holistic.... Indra's net implies that large and small things, near and far things are all 'near'". From an OOO perspective the app economy is a mesh, the remixological machine is a mesh, the app itself is a mesh: all at different scales but all object-meshes. Such a perspective allows the sort of technically informed account of apps that Platform Studies applies to video games, but also the sort of critical engagement with Apps that work with and through remix.
