Alien Phenomenology‚

or What It’s Like

to Be a Thing

ian bogost

universit y of minnesota press

minneapolis • london
 Portions of the book were previously published as “The Phenomenology of
Videogames,” in Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference,
ed. Stephan Günzel, Michael Leibe, and Dieter Mersch
(Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2008), 22–43.

“Particle Man,” words and music by John Linnell and John Flansburgh.
Copyright 1991 TMBG Music. All rights on behalf of TMBG Music
administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.
Used by permission of Alfred Music Publishing Company, Inc.

“Waters of March,” original text and music

by Antônio Carlos Jobim. Copyright 1972.

“16-bit Intel 8088 Chip” from You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense,
by Charles Bukowski. Copyright 1986 by Linda Lee Bukowski.
Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publisher.

Copyright 2012 by Ian Bogost

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Design by Yvonne Tsang at Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bogost, Ian.
Alien phenomenology, or What it’s like to be a thing / Ian Bogost.
(Posthumanities ; 20)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7897-6 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-7898-3 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Ontology. 2. Metaphysics. 3. Phenomenology.
I. Title. II. Title: What it’s like to be a thing.
BD331.B5927 2012
111—dc23 2012001202

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 [2]
on togr a ph y
Revealing the Rich Variety of Being

King Aethelberht II, the ruler of East Anglia, was executed by Offra
of Mercia in 794. There was a time when many held the opinion
that Offra led an early unification of England, and indeed Offra did
contribute to the expansion of Mercia from the Trent River valley
to much of the area now known as the English Midlands. More
recently, Offra’s invasions have been explained in more straight-
forward terms: as megalomania and bloodlust. Given this context,
Aethelberht’s later canonization was justified by martyrdom: he had
visited the court of Offra at Sutton Walls in Herefordshire in an ear-
nest attempt to make peace with Offra by asking for his daughter
Etheldreda’s hand in marriage. Offra took advantage of the situation,
detaining and then beheading Aethelberht, then soon after invading
and capturing East Anglia.
Montague Rhodes James is responsible for much of the definitive
scholarship on St. Aethelberht, work made possible thanks to excava-
tions he conducted at the Bury St. Edmunds Abbey in West Suffolk.
Among fragments unearthed there was the twelfth-century vita of St.
Aethelberht, which James reconstructed in the 1910s.
But like his countryman C. S. Lewis, James is rarely remem-
bered for his medieval scholarship. Instead, we know him best as
M. R. James, author of classic collections of ghost stories, including
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Still, traces of James’s medievalist roots
reveal themselves like apparitions on his pages, usually in the form of
gentleman–scholar protagonists who accidentally release supernatu-
ral wrath from an antique collectible.

35
 [ 36 ] Ontography

One such tale, “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,”
begins like this:

“I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full

Term is over, Professor,” said a person not in the story to the
Professor of Ontography, soon after they had sat down next
to each other at a feast in the hospitable hall of St James’s
College.

In the story, the antique in question turns out to be an inscribed

bronze whistle that, when blown by the naive Professor Parkins, sum-
mons the requisite ghost. But for our purposes, the interesting bit
is not the apparition but the professor’s unusual field of expertise,
ontography.1
James might have intended the term to be a then contemporary
absurdism, like Don DeLillo’s satirical Professor of Hitler Studies in
White Noise. Such was Graham Harman’s reaction to finding the
term.2 Ontography, Harman reasoned, “would deal with a limited
number of dynamics that can occur between all different sorts of ob-
jects,” an initial take on what he would later develop into a full-fledged
part of his philosophy. My adoption of “ontography” offers a differ-
ent interpretation of this received invention than that of Harman.
As it turns out, the term is not quite an invention, although it’s
hardly commonplace either. In his 1988 book The World View of
Contemporary Physics, Richard F. Kitchener declares, “Ontology
is the theory of the nature of existence, and ontography is its de-
scription.”3 Kinematics, transformation theory, and relativity offer
examples, ideas not so far from Harman’s back-of-the-napkin sketch
of Professor Parkins. Along these same lines, the science and tech-
nology studies scholar Michael Lynch suggests that “ontography is a
descriptive alternative to its grand-theoretical counterpart.”4
Other sources, if perhaps a bit untrustworthy, suggest that despite
its obscurity ontography very much (and very aptly) exists. According
to Susan Schulten, the geographer William Morris Davis (who was
also an American contemporary of James and a professor at Harvard)
deployed the term to describe “the human response to the physi-
cal landscape.”5 Schulten argues that ontography “moved geography
 Ontography [ 37 ]

toward a general concern with the causal relation between humans

and their earth.”6 This take on ontography may be laced with too
much correlationism to take root in my garden, but it does sow a
promising seed.
Another, more recent application of the concept comes from
Tobias Kuhn, a Swiss informaticist who has developed a method of
ontography for depicting controlled natural languages (CNLs)—
grammatically and semantically simplified languages for use in situ-
ations where reduced ambiguity is desirable, such as in technical
documentation.7 Kuhn’s method uses a graphical notation he calls
“ontographs.” Each ontograph “consists of a legend that introduces
types and relations and of a mini world that introduces individuals,
their types, and their relations” (Figure 1).8 A related but more fa-
miliar approach can be found in IKEA assembly instructions, which
renounce language entirely in order to be more readily usable in any
of the thirty-seven nations served by the company’s products for the
home.9 Kitchener’s, Davis’s, and Kuhn’s approaches have something
in common: an interest in diversity and specificity.

figure 1. Tobias Kuhn’s ontograph framework is a graphical notation for

representing types and relations in controlled natural languages, a kind
of formal language used in contexts where formalization or simplification
are desirable, such as technical documentation.
 [ 38 ] Ontography

Quentin Meillassoux uses the phrase “the great outdoors” to de-

scribe the outside reality that correlationism had stolen from philoso-
phy.10 The great outdoors involves both untold cosmic and worldly
paraphernalia as well as the reentry into a singular existential do-
main, one no longer broken down into crass hemispheres of nature
and culture. Both Meillassoux and Bruno Latour describe this binary
as closed-minded, blinkered.11 Once we put down the trappings of
culture and take the invitation into that great outdoors, a tremendous
wave of surprise and unexpectedness would overwhelm us—a “global
ether” of incredible novelty and unfamiliarity.12 As Latour sums up,
“If you are mixed up with trees, how do you know they are not using
you to achieve their dark designs?”13
Faced with such a situation, the first reaction we might have is
that of the registrar, taking note of the many forms of being. Let’s
adopt ontography as a name for a general inscriptive strategy, one
that uncovers the repleteness of units and their interobjectivity. From
the perspective of metaphysics, ontography involves the revelation
of object relationships without necessarily offering clarification or
description of any kind. Like a medieval bestiary, ontography can
take the form of a compendium, a record of things juxtaposed to
demonstrate their overlap and imply interaction through collocation.
The simplest approach to such recording is the list, a group of items
loosely joined not by logic or power or use but by the gentle knot of
the comma. Ontography is an aesthetic set theory, in which a par-
ticular configuration is celebrated merely on the basis of its existence.
Lists, as it happens, appear regularly in Latour’s works. They func-
tion primarily as provocations, as litanies of surprisingly contrasted
curiosities. One doesn’t need to look very hard to find examples of
these Latour litanies, as I call them:

A storm, a rat, a rock, a lake, a lion, a child, a worker, a gene,

a slave, the unconscious, a virus.
Elections, mass demonstrations, books, miracles, viscera laid
open on the altar, viscera laid out on the operating table,
figures, diagrams and plans, cries, monsters, exhibitions at
the pillory.
 Ontography [ 39 ]

The tree that springs up again, the locusts that devour the
crops, the cancer that beats others at its own game, the mul-
lahs who dissolve the Persian empire, the Zionists who loosen
the hold of the mullahs, the concrete in the power station
that cracks, the acrylic blues that consume other pigments,
the lion that does not follow the predictions of the oracle.14

Following Latour’s lead, Harman also adopts the rhetoric of lists,

whether as introduction (“object-oriented philosophy holds that the
relation of humans to pollen, oxygen, eagles, or windmills is no differ-
ent in kind from the interaction of these objects with each other”),15
as argument (“For we ourselves, just like Neanderthals, sparrows,
mushrooms, and dirt, have never done anything else than act amidst
the bustle of other actants”),16 or as emphasis (“among the coral reefs,
sorghum fields, paragliders, ant colonies, binary stars, sea voyages,
Asian swindlers, and desolate temples”).17 He offers a defense and
justification for lists:

Some readers may . . . dismiss them as an “incantation” or

“poetics” of objects. But most readers will not soon grow tired,
since the rhetorical power of these rosters of beings stems from
their direct opposition to the flaws of current mainstream phi-
losophy. . . . The best stylistic antidote to this grim deadlock
is a repeated sorcerer’s chant of the multitude of things that
resist any unified empire.18

Litanies are not indulgences; they do indeed perform real philosoph-

ical work. Yet naming objects is only one ontographical method, the
most basic one. In addition to mere mention, things also ought to be
considered conjunctively, lest the lighthouse, dragonfly, lawnmower,
and barley all collapse into the abstraction of example without exem-
plification.
In his curious book The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings,
Francis Spufford explains why lists feel troublesome in literature:

Language usually puts the signs that represent things into

definite relationships with each other. Syntax joins: I want to
 [ 40 ] Ontography

be loved by you, or the sky is falling, or Mr Murdoch has bought

The Times. Lists, however, divide, or leave divided, the things
they include. They offer only the relationship of accumula-
tion: I, you, love, sky, fall, purchase, Mr Murdoch, The Times.
Lists refuse the connecting powers of language, in favor of a
sequence of disconnected elements.19

The inherent partition between things is a premise of OOO, and

lists help underscore those separations, turning the flowing legato of
a literary account into the jarring staccato of real being. Lists offer
an antidote to the obsession with Deleuzean becoming, a preference
for continuity and smoothness instead of sequentiality and fitful-
ness. The familiar refrain of “becoming-whatever” (it doesn’t matter
what!) suggests comfort and compatibility in relations between units,
thanks to the creative negotiations things make with each other. By
contrast, alien phenomenology assumes the opposite: incompatibil-
ity. The off-pitch sound of lists to the literary ear only emphasizes
their real purpose: disjunction instead of flow. Lists remind us that
no matter how fluidly a system may operate, its members neverthe-
less remain utterly isolated, mutual aliens.
Yet Spufford underestimates the ontological scope of lists. Lists
do not just rebuff the connecting powers of language but rebuff the
connecting powers of being itself. As he observes, “No one scribbles
down a helpful sonnet before going shopping. . . . Finding a list in a
book or a poem is an immediate reminder of the most obvious dif-
ferences between literature and every other kind of non-performing
art: literature is made out of something, language, that is an everyday
stuff.”20 Philosophers, literary critics, and theorists spend so much
of their time dealing with textual material that they risk forgetting
about the ordinary status of such material. When made of language,
lists remind the literary-obsessed that the stuff of things is many. Lists
are perfect tools to free us from the prison of representation precisely
because they are so inexpressive. They decline traditional artifice, in-
stead using mundaneness to offer “a brief intimation of everything.”21
Perhaps the problem is not with lists but with literature, whose
preference for traditional narrative acts as a correlationist ampli-
fier. Whether empathy or defamiliarization is its goal, literature
 Ontography [ 41 ]

aspires for identification, to create resonance between readers and

the human characters in a work. Lists work differently. Consider this
one, which appears in Roland Barthes’s delightfully strange auto-
biography:

J’aime, je n’aime pas ~ I like, I don’t like

I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell
of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a “nose” make
such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely
held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat
pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white
peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens,
desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee,
Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne,
Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change,
Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of
southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor
L.’s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the
morning leaving Salamanca, etc.

I don’t like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums,

strawberries, the harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated
cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, the afternoon, Satie,
Bartók, Vivaldi, telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin’s
concertos, Burgundian branles and Renaissance dances, the
organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and kettle-
drums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, sponta-
neity, evenings with people I don’t know, etc.22

Like literary prose, the account is meant to help the reader grasp
something about Barthes, yet by fashioning a list he also draws our
attention to the curious world outside his person, as filtered through
the arbitrary meter of likes and dislikes. Unlike his literary and criti-
cal works, this list disrupts being, spilling a heap of unwelcome and
incoherent crap at the foot of the reader. In doing so, a tiny part of the
expanding universe is revealed through cataloging.
Ontographical cataloging hones a virtue: the abandonment of
 [ 42 ] Ontography

anthropocentric narrative coherence in favor of worldly detail.

Quasi-ontographical prototypes are common throughout literature
and the arts, where catalogs and lists pepper a narrative, disrupting
a story with unexpected piquancy. The catalog of ships in book 2 of
Homer’s Iliad offers one example, its inventory of the Achaean navy
covering some 265 lines of the epic and detailing over one thousand
ships from fifty different locales carrying well over a hundred differ-
ent nationalities.23 Similarly, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick catalogs
the equipment and practices of nineteenth-century whaling as much
as it does a story of obsession and revenge. A characteristic excerpt:

The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense

honeycomb of oil, formed by the crossing and re-crossing,
into ten thousand infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres
throughout its whole extent. The upper part, known as the
Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the
Sperm Whale. And as that famous great tierce is mystically
carved in front, so the whale’s vast plaited forehead forms in-
numerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment
of his wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was
always replenished with the most excellent of the wines of
the Rhenish valleys, so the tun of the whale contains by far
the most precious of all his oily vintages; namely, the highly-
prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid, and odorifer-
ous state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed in
any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains per-
fectly fluid, yet, upon exposure to the air, after death, it soon
begins to concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots,
as when the first thin delicate ice is just forming in water.24

Passages like this are frequent and detailed enough to match the
travails of Ishmael, Queequeg, Ahab, and others on the Pequod. It
would be just as appropriate to call Moby-Dick a natural history as
it would a novel—the former is perhaps more apt, even.
A truly deliberate—not to mention lucid and beautiful—
specimen of inventory ontography can be found in the Brazilian
bossa nova, a form of soft jazz that evolved from samba in the mid-
 Ontography [ 43 ]

twentieth century. Just as Spufford’s written lists make a break with

literary tradition in form as much as in content, bossa nova’s struc-
ture differs considerably from other musical forms. It softens the
swing rhythm of jazz into a gentler sway. And unlike samba, bossa
nova has no dance step; it’s designed to be heard rather than felt. Fur-
thermore, the structure of pop music finds no place in bossa nova,
where repetitive, whispery, lyrical verses take the place of the narra-
tive verse-chorus-bridge structure.
“The Girl from Ipanema” is probably the best-known example,
with its tiny catalog of properties—“tall and tan and young and
lovely”—but Tom Jobim’s “Águas de Março” (“Waters of March”) is
the ultimate ontographic bossa nova collage. Each line begins with
“É” (“It’s” in the English version, which Jobim also wrote) and names
one or two objects. A wide variety of things are mentioned in the
song, from natural objects (stick, stone, oak, fish) to human-made
ones (spear, truck, bricks, gun) to concepts (must, bet, loss, nothing).
The song’s lyrics could be interpreted as a gentle memento mori,
detailing the passing of life into and out of prosperity, but the song’s
rhythm and tone give the lie to that sort of moralism.
Instead, the “Waters of March” name the torrential rains of Rio
de Janeiro, bossa nova’s birthplace. The deluge floods the streets,
dredging up and making visible the myriad things seen and unseen
in normal conditions. Here’s a sample (note that the English version
differs from the Portuguese in some verses):

É pau, é pedra, A stick, a stone,

é o fim do caminho It’s the end of the road,
É um resto de toco, It’s the rest of a stump,
é um pouco sozinho It’s a little alone
É um caco de vidro, It’s a sliver of glass,
é a vida, é o sol It is life, it’s the sun,
É a noite, é a morte, It is night, it is death,
é um laço, é o anzol It’s a trap, it’s a gun
É peroba do campo, The oak when it blooms,
é o nó da madeira A fox in the brush,
Caingá, candeia, A knot in the wood,
é o Matita Pereira The song of a thrush
 [ 44 ] Ontography

É madeira de vento, The wood of the wind,

tombo da ribanceira A cliff, a fall,
É o mistério profundo, A scratch, a lump,
é o queira ou não queira It is nothing at all

“Waters of March” does real ontological work. By setting the objects

of “it” to a wide variety of different things, it gives sonorous voice to
flat ontology. In a verse like the one below, we find the juxtaposition
of a human-made, aggregate object, a natural condition, an action,
and a concept:

A truckload of bricks
in the soft morning light,
The shot of a gun
in the dead of the night

Perhaps this incredible flexibility and openness toward things of all

sorts explains why “Waters of March” has been frequently appro-
priated as a platform for communicating ontological repleteness. A
somewhat less object-oriented version of the song made an appear-
ance in a 1985 Coca-Cola ad, which declared, “It’s a kick, it’s a hit,
it’s a Coke, Coke is it.”25 The it’s of “Waters of March” offers the mar-
keter a perfect translation of the Coca-Cola Company’s hopes for the
famous slogan that appears in their commercial rendition of Jobim’s
bossa nova. No matter the situation, a cold Coca-Cola has a place.
More recently, the San Francisco–based television advertising
director Carl Willat made an unauthorized, self-promotional tele-
vision commercial for the American specialty grocer Trader Joe’s
(which famously refuses to air advertisements).26 Unlike Coke’s thirty-
second spot, Willat’s homage runs for nearly three minutes, recreat-
ing the entirety of “Waters of March” in reference to the curious and
wonderful things that occupy Trader Joe’s. A selection of verses from
Willat’s short film:

It’s milk, it’s bread

It’s the stuff on your list
It’s the strange little snacks
 Ontography [ 45 ]

you end up buying instead

It’s a box of soup
It’s a bell from a boat
It’s yogurt made
from the milk of a goat
A handle that rips
on a paper sack
That checker you like
who’ll never be back
It’s the plastic grapes
hanging over the wine
It’s the guy with twelve items
in the ten item line
It’s the beautiful moms
in their yoga clothes
It’s your favorite place
it’s that store Trader Joe’s

Willat’s adaptation characterizes the store effectively because he

recognizes that a great wealth of objects constitute it—not just the
products but also the queues, the parking lot, the product discontinu-
ations, the customers, the decor. This may seem like a prosaic obser-
vation to make in print, but watching the video produces a sensation
of surprise: the experience of Trader Joe’s is not just that of the shop-
per but also that of the shelving, the managerial policy, the secretive
economics, the aloe chunk juice. Lists of objects without explication
can do the philosophical work of drawing our attention toward them
with greater attentiveness.

visual ontogr aphs

Verbal lists like Latour litanies and “Waters of March” teach us that
the specificity of objects well up when situations are concretized and
enumerated. Yet these examples are fleeting, the exceptions that
prove the rule. How might such a strategy be carried out on a larger
scale?
One such effort can be found in François Blanciak’s speculative,
paradigmatic architectural theory Siteless. In a series of 1,001 rectilin-
 [ 46 ] Ontography

ear sketches, all drawn freehand “for the sake of versatility,” Blanciak
offers a hypothetical account of abstracted interedifice relations as
they might exist in some hypothetical alien cityscape. The forms are
all identical in size, with no sense of scale to distinguish office tower
from iron sculpture from garden slug. Within each, he suggests (but
does not clarify) formal, material, aesthetic, and representational
implications of hypothetical structures. For example, the “optician
building” illustrates a reading chart inscribed into the face of a tall
rectangular structure; the “pixel circle” depicts a blocky “O” shape
that appears much thinner than it is wide; the “inflatable floors”
sketch shows a log cabin–like shape composed of puffy layers; and
the “house arena” details an open space produced by unfolding the
sides of a canonical house form into hinged surfaces (see Figure 2).27
While architecture has
embraced the optical illu-
sion of material deformation
since the rise of architectural
deconstructivism, that style’s
characteristic shapes often
fail to contrast the form of a
structure with the malleabil-
ity of a material. Frank Geh-
ry’s Walt Disney Concert
Hall and Dancing House in-
sinuate motion and gesture,
but it is difficult to experi-
ence such works as spatial
organisms both supple and
rigid all at once. After the
figure 2. Four of the more than one
thousand abstract architectural forms in construction of the Disney
François Blanciak’s architectural treatise Concert Hall, nearby resi-
Siteless, which offers “an open-ended dents complained about the
compendium of visual ideas for the
hot, blinding reflections that
architectural imagination to draw from.”
issued from the building’s
polished stainless steel surface. Perhaps this result came about not
because Gehry had failed to take the surrounding neighborhood into
account (as he is often criticized for doing) but because he had failed
to consider the building as an ontograph of sun, cushion, and steel.
 Ontography [ 47 ]

By contrast, Blanciak’s sketches offer a simultaneity of material

and form that brings together unfamiliar objects implausibly, often
in materially impossible relation. The “floor bud,” for example, offers
a series of surfaces gathered together in the form of a rose. The simul-
taneity of forms suggests different object relations, within and with-
out the domain of architectural reality: petal as substrate for insect,
for raindrop; floor as housing for wood, for metal, for rat, for copper
wire. All together, the 1,001 takes on simultaneous abstract objects
provide ontographies of unrelated objects, akin to Latour litanies but
with implied if speculative material couplings between unfamiliar
entities.
As Lynch describes it, “Ontography would involve . . . mundane,
deflationary transformation.”28 Such mutations already appear in La-
tour’s litanies and in Blanciak’s speculative hybrid forms, but some-
thing overly remarkable is still going on in both cases. Mullahs and
monsters, cushioned skyscrapers bent back on themselves—these are
all fantastical inscriptions. Moreover, they are scarce and precious:
the occasional devotional interlude in a study of bacteria, a scant
example of a fleeting experimental structural design.
For a more ordinary alternative, consider the photography of
Stephen Shore. He is an artist best known for two things, document-
ing Andy Warhol’s Factory in the mid-1960s and popularizing color
photography as a fine arts practice in the 1970s. But such a charac-
terization ignores the remarkable creativity in Shore’s photographs.
Fifty years before Shore, Brassaï had dragged an enormous view
camera with tripod and magnesium powder lights around Paris—a
process anyone who has climbed the steps of Montmartre might find
more remarkable than his famous image of them. Yet at a time when
Henri Cartier-Bresson and Garry Winogrand’s tiny Leica rangefind-
ers still set the standard for the subtle documentation of the outside
world, Shore returned to the film plates of Brassaï’s era. It might be
tempting to imagine a photographic version of Latour litanies that
involve innumerable images, the sort of strategy Winogrand brought
to street photography. But Shore did the opposite, making precious
few photographs with an 8 × 10 view camera he lugged across North
America.29
Today, photography has become so commonplace that we scarcely
think about its equipment, except perhaps to compare statistics on
 [ 48 ] Ontography

the latest gadget. But Shore’s photography cannot be fully appreci-

ated without an understanding of the nature of the view camera. To
take a photograph with one, the photographer must set up the device
and frame its image on a ground glass plate inserted in the film back.
The lens projects onto the film plane upside down, requiring the
photographer to compose and focus in a way that is decidedly unlike
the way we normally think of photography, as an unmediated way
of looking. Once composed, the photographer replaces the ground
glass with emulsion and uses a wired release to trip the shutter and
expose the film. The process invites the artist to see the scene to be
captured separately from the way the camera will see it. It offers a
phenomenal parallax that already invites curiosity toward the objects
in the scene: the view through the ground glass is not only rotated
but also translated from the photographer’s natural vantage point.
Brassaï composed and recomposed, watching the image on
ground glass before capturing and later obsessing over the edges of
his frames for perfection. The same is true of Ansel Adams, who also
used view cameras to capture America’s dynamical sublime. Both
sought to overcome the perceptual parallax of the view camera by
producing the most humanlike perspective possible, usually an ideal-
ized view. Everything finds its place: black lampposts in relief against
the mist wafting up the escalier de Montmartre, the Snake River
winding carefully back and forth toward the snowcapped Tetons, a
young girl carefully hidden in the shadows of a corner shop’s eaves.
All inspire, invoke, or reinforce our ordinary, human experience of
these objects and scenes.
But Shore composes entirely different images. It is easy to say that
the subjects—city streets and motels mostly—are more mundane, but
to be fair, the streets of Paris before the war and Wyoming before the
Jackson Hole National Monument were also mundane in their eras.
Shore’s images are deflationary not because their subjects are subor-
dinate but because their composition underscores unseen things and
relations (Plates 1a–c).

In New York City, a television sits atop a pale orange table.

Nearby rest glass bottles and some sort of frame wrapped in
paper. The television’s single antenna extends to the side,
crossing in front of the tallest bottle.
 Ontography [ 49 ]

In Rolla, Missouri, a water fountain perches in a semi-

circular alcove, its drain pipe extending to the right and into
the wall behind, while its power cord attaches to an outlet just
above its basin.
In Alberta, a textured, rust-colored lamp with shade
sits near the edge of a table, while an ashtray holds down a
motel survey. Nearby, a window lever emerges from behind
curtains.30

These images register the world.31 As Michael Fried explains, the

images are remarkable because Shore’s relation to the subject is
unironic. “You don’t seem superior to the material. Nor are you see-
ing these places and things as a foreigner might,” suggests Fried to
Shore in an interview.32 The result, Fried suggests, is “imaginatively
liberating.” They posit objects, even the objects of human activity, in
a world of mysterious relation with one another.
Consider one of his most famous images. At the corner of Bev-
erly and La Brea in Los Angeles, a Chevron station sits across from
a Texaco (Plate 2). While the composition suggests the familiar van-
tage point of a pedestrian, the view itself bears little resemblance
to the street photographer’s usual focus on human activity. An im-
mense swath of pavement occupies most of the bottom of the image,
drawing attention to the pneumatic cable that stretches in front of
the pumps. It curls like a pig’s tail. In the center of the frame, plas-
tic numerals attach to a sign to indicate prices. Below them, a soft
vinyl tube contains radial tires, the form of which gives the tube its
shape. Just behind, a station wagon’s transmission assembly extends
down from its chassis, almost reaching the painted asphalt surface
of a crosswalk. Everywhere, all across the image, objects tousle one
another.
To list them underscores the difference between a Latour litany
and a Shore ontograph: floodlight, screen print, Mastercard, rubber,
asphalt, taco, Karmann Ghia, waste bin, oil stain. The Latour litany
gathers disparate things together like a strong gravitational field. But
the Shore ontograph takes things already gathered and explodes
them into their tiny, separate, but contiguous universes. As Christy
Lange explains, “This was a new conception of the landscape pic-
ture, one in which the details themselves—their density and abun-
 [ 50 ] Ontography

dance, rather than their entirety—were intended to be the focal point

or subject.”33 Nothing is overlooked, nothing reduced to anything
else, nothing given priority. Instead, everything sits suspended.
Other photographs invite greater specificity. On an outdoor din-
ing table at a McDonald’s in Perrine, Florida, a partly eaten ham-
burger rests inside a polystyrene box (Plate 3). Fries and a cup of ice
milk sit atop a napkin, while deep scratches on the table below reveal
a pink surface beneath yellow paint. In this image, Shore focuses our
attention not on the gastronomical relation between lunch and hun-
ger, or on the industrial relation between franchise and customer,
or even on the amorous relation between a previous diner and an
unseen girl called Jenny, whose name has been scratched into the
table’s cold surface. Instead, units reveal themselves: pickle dangles
across meat patty, salt scuttles from fry, ice milk clings to the inside
of plastic straw. It is a common image for Shore, the secret lives of
meals.
But ontographically speaking, this image tells us nothing about
the perception of milk on plastic, seed on bun. It simply catalogs,
like the monk’s bestiary, exemplifying the ways that human interven-
tion can never entirely contain the mysterious alien worlds of objects.
Like painting, photography usually operates on the temporal scale of
now. The landscape or the still life shows the corporeal arrangements
of things, arrested before human perception. But Shore’s work rejects
the singularity of the now in favor of the infinity of the meanwhile.

e xploded vie ws
Meanwhile is a powerful ontographical tool. The unit is both a system
and a set. Under normal conditions, its state remains jumbled, incon-
spicuous, unseen in its withdrawal. In its most raw form, the Latour
litany offers an account of a segment of being. It’s an account in the
literal sense of the word, like a ledger keeps the financial books. The
practice of ontography—and it is a practice, not merely a theory—
describes the many processes of accounting for the various units that
strew themselves throughout the universe. To create an ontograph in-
volves cataloging things, but also drawing attention to the couplings
of and chasms between them. The tire and chassis, the ice milk and
cup, the buckshot and soil: things like these exist not just for us but
 Ontography [ 51 ]

also for themselves and for one another, in ways that might surprise
and dismay us. Such is the ontographical project, to draw attention
to the countless things that litter our world unseen. As Harman puts
it in his application of the term, ontography is “a name . . . for the
exercise of describing and classifying pairings” of objects.34 Harman’s
use is different from mine (he uses “ontography” to describe the rela-
tions between what he calls real and sensual qualities of objects), but
the spirit is the same: “Rather than a geography dealing with stock
natural characters such as forests and lakes, ontography maps the
basic landmarks and fault lines in the universe of objects.”35
We can analogize the spirit of ontography with a technique in
graphic and information design, the exploded view diagram. Such
drawings are commonly found today in parts manuals, assembly
instructions, technical books, posters, and other diagrams meant to
“show the mating relationships of parts, subassemblies, and higher
assemblies.”36 But the technique dates back to the Renaissance, as
even a cursory review of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks reveals.
The exploded-view drawing is meant to clarify some complex
physical system for the benefit of a human constructor, operator,
or designer (Figure 3). But in common practice, an exploded-view
drawing offers just as much intrigue as it does use value: for example,
when viewing a car parts manual, someone with no knowledge of

figure 3. Exploded-view diagrams show both sides of being, density,

and expansion. This example shows the components of a Shimano
three-speed internal gear hub for a bicycle. Among the several dozen
parts that constitute it are a cone stay washer (4), a planet pinion (16),
and a pawl spring (27).
 [ 52 ] Ontography

automotive repair can still bask in the unfamiliar repleteness present

in a modern automobile. Likewise, a child pores over the cutaway
view of the submarine unfolded from a magazine not to learn how to
operate it but to fathom a small aspect of its murky otherworldliness.
They are not identical, but the exploded view and the ontograph
have much in common. An anonymous, unseen situation of things is
presented in a way that effectively draws our attention to its configu-
rative nature. An ontograph records the presence of many potential
unit operations, a profusion of particular perspectives on a particular
set of things.
It’s no wonder, then, that photography offers such good exam-
ples—the photograph has long been understood as a “way of looking.”
On the one hand, it offers a view of the world that is representational,
thanks to the photographer’s framing and choice of exposure. On
the other hand, it offers an automatically encyclopedic rendition
of a scene, thanks to the photographic apparatus’s ability to record
actuality. Shore’s enormous plate film is particularly adept at such
renditions, able to capture vast detail at high resolution. Not every
photograph is an ontograph, but Shore’s work tends in this direction,
partly because he refuses to treat any object as primary, as a subject.
“Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue” regards nothing in particu-
lar and everything all at once. Shore’s framing technique turns his
photographs into ontographs.

ontogr aphic machines

Photographic ontography is effective as art and as metaphysics. But
photographs are static; they imply but do not depict unit operations.
For the latter, we must look to artifacts that themselves operate.
Many puzzle toys and games are abstract: Rubik’s Cube, Tetris,
and Bejeweled ask players to manipulate shapes and figures to com-
plete goals. Cube faces, polyominoes, and gem tokens are certainly
real objects, but they are also units removed from context such that
their associations with other units become indistinct. But other
games are concrete, mapping abstract gestures to concrete meanings.
The popular puzzle board game Rush Hour is such a one. The game
is played on a gray plastic grid onto which molded automobiles of
various sizes can be arranged. The player attempts to extract a red
 Ontography [ 53 ]

car through an opening in the side of the game board by moving

the other vehicles out of its way. Cars and trucks can be moved only
by sliding them backward or forward along their axis of orientation.
The game comes with many dozens of puzzle cards, which describe
initial states of the board for the player to solve, each becoming more
difficult than the last.
Rush Hour could have been created with abstract colored blocks
instead of vehicles. The experience of playing the game would re-
main the same, on a mechanical level at least. On a representational
level, however, its meaning would become indeterminate. Just imag-
ine an abstract Stephen Shore–style ontograph, with multicolored,
three-dimensional polyhedrons taking the place of tire stack, station
wagon, traffic light, and all of the many other objects in the pic-
ture. Such an artifact might be interesting as art, particularly if it
re-created the overall form of a real scene, but it would likely not be
ontographical in the same way as the original. The addition of a fic-
tional skin connects the mechanical operation of the abstract game
to the material reality of a specific unit operation—in this case traffic
congestion. If the fictional skin and the mechanical depth are tightly
coupled, then the resulting game can offer a compelling account of
an ontological domain.37
Rush Hour offers a good example of tight coupling, but its scope
is more limited than a Latour litany or a Shore ontograph: only car
and road appear in the game. Scribblenauts offers a more encyclo-
pedic account of things. It’s an unusual videogame created by the
developer 5th Cell and released for the Nintendo DS handheld in
2009. On first glance, the game looks like any other 2-D platform
or adventure game. The player controls a cute, pixelated character
named Maxwell. Each of its two hundred levels takes place in an
abstraction of a realistic environment, be it city, ice floe, mine, or
ocean. Somewhere in the level sits a “Starite” (a shiny star icon),
which the player must collect to complete the level. The challenge
comes in reaching the starite, a task troubled by one of two chal-
lenges, depending on the game mode. In puzzle levels, the player
must help Maxwell complete a task to reveal the starite: return soil
samples to the astronaut; fill and pay for a tray of cafeteria food;
stop the out-of-control truck. In action levels, the player must help
 [ 54 ] Ontography

Maxwell capture a starite placed out of reach: atop a tree, perhaps, or

across a lake, or underground, for example.
To overcome such challenges, the player can summon objects
into the level by typing their names into a notebook in the game.
The game recognizes almost anything—its dictionary includes some
22,800 terms, from air raid shelter to zucchini.38 After the player types
a word that the game recognizes, the requested object drops into the
game, bearing an appearance and behavior befitting its name. The
player can then move, connect, operate, and manipulate these ob-
jects to complete the game’s puzzles.
Scribblenauts puzzles ask the player to retrieve only the starite,
but they also offer incentives to explore the operational possibility
space formed by the level scenario along with the many thousands
of summonable objects. Some of these incentives are codified in the
game itself: after completing a level, the game awards “merits” for
meeting certain criteria (e.g., “entomologist” for using two or more
insects, or “savior” for completing a level without harming any hu-
manoids or animals).39 Playing a level three times without reusing
objects earns a gold star.
But even absent these explicit incentives, the game still inspires
natural curiosity. Despite its incredibly bare-bones simulation of in-
dividual and interobject behaviors, Scribblenauts still motivates play-
ers to explore a multitude of unit operations by sheer force of charm.
In the game’s eleventh puzzle level, the player must collect three
flowers without harming them or the girl whose basket awaits them.
One flower is guarded by a bee, one sits underwater near a piranha,
and one sits precipitously atop a ledge. Innumerable permutations
of unit operations exist for completing the puzzle, some portion of
which the average player will explore in a single session. Here are the
some of the sixteen attempts the critic Stephen Totilo tried before
completing the level:

Attempt 3: Made bear; bear killed bee. Laid down bear trap,
ran away. Bear didn’t chase. Ran back over. Caught self in
bear trap. Mauled by bear. Level failed.
Attempt 6: Made exterminator. Exterminator fumigated bee.
Did not grab first flower. Approached piranha lake. Made fish-
 Ontography [ 55 ]
ing boat. Dropped big boat into lake. Boat must have crushed
flower. Level failed.
Attempt 10: Made gun. Tried to shoot bee dead. Bullet rico-
cheted and destroyed first flower. Level failed.
Attempt 12: Made hot air balloon. Put Maxwell in it. Flew
over piranha lake. Made gun. Shot at fish. Gun destroyed hot
air balloon instead. Fell into lake. Jumped out of lake. Made
corpse. Threw it into lake to draw fish away. Made gun to shoot
fish while it ate corpse. Shots didn’t hit. Made new corpse and
tried with sniper rifle. Didn’t work. Dove in and just grabbed
flower. Success. Bee was gone. Put lake flower in basket. Put
bee flower in basket. Made helicopter to get to high ridge for
final flower. Was afraid to land helicopter on ledge, out of fear
of destroying flower. Tried to jump out of helicopter. Fell into
piranha lake. Died. Level failed.
Attempt 13: Made gun. Shot bee dead. Got first flower. Made
two corpses. Tossed them into piranha lake for distraction.
Dove and recovered second flower. Made truck and dumped
it into lake. Did same with a boat. Tried climbing over those
vehicles to get to ledge and final flower. Vehicles shifted; Max-
well thrown into ridge wall. Died. Level failed.

Attempt 16. Made gun. Shot bee dead. Made hot air balloon.
Flew to ridge. Got out, grabbed flower. Got back in balloon.
Safely put cliff flower in basket. Put bee flower in basket.
Threw corpses into piranha lake to distract fish. Dove in and
grabbed lake flower. Jumped out. Put lake flower in basket.
Starite found! Success! 40

Shore’s photographs catalog the way things exist in a given situation.

Scribblenauts catalogs the way things work in one. Both approaches
explode the density of being, giving viewer and player a view of a tiny
sliver of the infinity of being, through reconfiguration.

what ’s in a word?
A Latour litany reveals a few unfamiliar corners of being’s infinity
through naming. Scribblenauts reveals objects’ relations by inspiring
 [ 56 ] Ontography

players to invoke their behaviors in relation to one another, by keying

in the signs that name them. In both cases, language works referen-
tially, identifying an object such that the edges of its experience can
be imagined or explored.
But language itself is composed of things. Words do not just de-
note, they also operate. We can understand signs themselves to have
experiences of one another that remain comprehensible only by
tracing their own relations to our engagement with them as signi-
fiers. Latour litanies already lead us to the river of semiotic ontol-
ogy, offering brochures of semantic units—words—as much as of
material ones. In that respect, grammatical incantations like the
recitation of Latin declensions function ontographically, as an in-
formal catalog of the varieties of grammatical case possible with a
linguistic domain: puella, puellae, puellae, puellam, puella. But
more complex examples of linguistic ontography require more de-
tailed, deliberate artifacts that expose the strange graspings of stuffs
linguistic.
Take In a Pickle, a card game about words. Play is simple: each
card is emblazoned with a word, and under the word is an arrow
pointing downward. The players are dealt five such cards each, and
four more are placed face up on the table. On each turn, a player
selects a card and places it atop one of the outermost cards in a pile.
For such a play to be valid, the word on the card played must either fit
inside or be larger than the outermost card onto which it is played, or
be able to be fit inside or be smaller than the innermost card. For ex-
ample, given the starting card “Dryer,” “Basement” could be played
atop it, on the outside. Then “Shirt” could be placed underneath
“Dryer,” on the inside. Play proceeds like this until a row contains
four cards, in which case players take turns playing one last card that
is larger than the outermost card in the pile (see Figure 4). The game
continues until one player captures a winning number of sets (the
winning total varies based on the number of players).
The game instructions encourage players to “think creatively and
play cards that might not ‘fit’ in an obvious way.” Players can chal-
lenge such “creative” interpretations, and opponents vote to allow or
invalidate them. The designers offer such an example in the rules:
“Yes, you can fit a Turkey in a Purse. It’s sliced turkey.”
In a Pickle is based on homography. In linguistics, homographs
 Ontography [ 57 ]

figure 4. A round of In a Pickle in progress. Note how the chain

combines physical and conceptual objects at various scales.

are two different words that share the same orthography yet have dif-
ferent meanings. For example, “bark” (the sound a dog makes) and
“bark” (the surface of a tree) are homographs. Homographs are help-
ful lenses for tiny ontology, which maintains that being multiplies
and expands. Bark the name for a dog’s sound and bark the name for
a woody surface are different units (remember, we’re talking about
the signifiers as much as the signifieds). Yet bark is another thing
entirely, a sign that can mean several things to an English speaker,
among them the sound of a dog and the covering of a tree. (For that
matter, bark is also an instance of that sign, which appears in the
present sentence.)
Moves far more interesting than “Turkey in a Purse” are possible
in the game, thanks to the mereological possibility space afforded by
homography. As the game’s title suggests, a Fork could be in a Pickle,
but a Bank Robber could as well. For that matter, a Movie could be
in a Pickle (when “Movie” is as a metonym for its production), and
yet a Pickle could be in a Movie (when “Pickle” is a prop). So could a
Bank Robber. Indeed, a Pickle could be in a Bank Robber in a Pickle
in a Movie in a Pickle.
 [ 58 ] Ontography

Things just get weirder: A Movie could be in a Letter (“I just

saw this strange movie about an incompetent, vinegar-loving bank
robber”), which could be in an Atlas (as a bookmark), which could
be in a Tornado, in a Dream, in a Woman, in a Marriage. Or better,
a Movie could be in the Universe, which could nevertheless also be
in a letter (“I wouldn’t give up pickles for anything in the world”), in
the Mail, in Time.
A Latour litany is an ontograph made of words. By contrast, In a
Pickle is a machine for producing ontographs about words. It bears
the tagline, “The what’s in a word game,” and in this case “in a word”
means two things. For one, it takes on the idiomatic sense of “briefly”
or “in a nutshell.” Indeed, nutshellery isn’t a bad metaphor for tiny
ontology—the condensation of multitudes into dense singularities.
For another, it implies containment. Words have semantic extensions
for human speakers, and playing with homographs can reveal those
extensions. But containment also takes yet another, even more curi-
ous meaning. “In a word” can refer to the interior of a semantic unit,
the molten core of a name, where its various homographs and refer-
ents swim like ribosomes grazing on peptide chains.
A Latour litany helps catalog material, conceptual, and fictional
objects; In a Pickle shows us how ontography can be performed on far
more abstract units. If a dictionary shows us the meaning of words for
us, the game attempts the opposite: to reveal that words have mean-
ing for themselves. A dictionary is a catalog of the meanings of words.
But In a Pickle is a catalog of the insides of words, like a crossword
puzzle is a dictionary of the letters between them.
Dictionaries, grocery stores, Rio de Janeiro, La Brea, and Beverly—
these are the labels we stick to the outsides of things. They mark
them with relevance, but they also occlude the richness of their infi-
nite depths. Ontography is a practice of increasing the number and
density, one that sometimes opposes the minimalism of contempo-
rary art. Instead of removing elements to achieve the elegance of
simplicity, ontography adds (or simply leaves) elements to accomplish
the realism of multitude. It is a practice of exploding the innards of
things—be they words, intersections, shopping malls, or creatures.
This “explosion” can be as figurative or as literal as you like, but it
must above all reveal the hidden density of a unit.
 Ontography [ 59 ]

For the ontographer, Aristotle was wrong: nature does not operate
in the shortest way possible but in a multitude of locally streamlined
yet globally inefficient ways.41 Indeed, an obsession with simple ex-
planations ought to bother the metaphysician. Instead of worship-
ping simplicity, OOO embraces messiness. We must not confuse the
values of the design of objects for human use, such as doors, toasters,
and computers, with the nature of the world itself. An ontograph is
a crowd, not a cellular automaton that might describe its emergent
operation. An ontograph is a landfill, not a Japanese garden. It shows
how much rather than how little exists simultaneously, suspended in
the dense meanwhile of being:
On August 10, 1973, at a boathouse in Southwest Houston, the
shovel of a police forensics investigator struck the femur of one of
seventeen corpses excavated that week, victims of serial killer Dean
Corll.
Meanwhile, 235 nautical miles above the earth’s surface, a radio
wave began its course from Skylab to a parabolic radar dish antenna
aboard United States Naval Ship Vanguard.
Meanwhile, at Royals Stadium in Kansas City, Lou Piniella’s cleat
met home plate, kicking up dust as it scored what would become the
team’s winning run against the Baltimore Orioles.
And meanwhile, at the Trail’s End Restaurant in Kanab, Utah, a
bowl snuggled a half cantaloupe, and butter seeped into the caramel-
ized surface of a pancake (Plate 4).
 [ 140 ] Notes

69. Heinlein, Grumbles from the Grave, 49.

70. Husserl, Husserliana (24), 118.
71. Lingis, Imperative, 63.
72. Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology, 45.
73. Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, 183.
74. http://earthspeaks.seti.org.
75. http://earthspeaks.seti.org/pages/About.
76. Rescher, “Extraterrestrial Science,” 83–116.
77. Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien, 74.

2. ontogr aphy
1. I am indebted to Graham Harman for pointing out this reference,
from which we have both benefited in different ways.
2. Harman, “Ontography.”
3. Kitschener, World View of Contemporary Physics, 76.
4. Lynch, “Ontography,” 9.
5. Schulten, Geographical Imagination in America, 75.
6. Ibid., 105–6.
7. For example, in the 1970s Caterpillar made use of a controlled Eng-
lish known as Caterpillar Technical English for technical authoring and
international documentation. See Kamprath, Adolphson, Mitamura, and
Nyberg, “Controlled Language for Multilingual Document Production.”
8. Kuhn, “How to Evaluate Controlled Natural Languages.” See also
http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/docs/ontograph/.
9. For an example of IKEA assembly instructions, see http://semitough.
files.wordpress.com/2008/03/ikea_instructions.jpg. For a different but re-
lated example, see Mike Sacks and Julian Sancton’s hilarious send-up of
IKEA instructions on page 62 of the June 2006 issue of Esquire, http://www.
doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/ikea-instructions.jpg.
10. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 7, 26–29, 63.
11. Latour, Pasteurization of France, 199.
12. Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, 3.
13. Latour, Pasteurization of France, 194.
14. Ibid., 192, 196, 198.
15. Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, 1.
16. Harman, Prince of Networks, 58.
17. Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, 3.
18. Harman, Prince of Networks, 102.
19. Spufford, Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings, 1.
20. Ibid., 2.
 Notes [ 141 ]

21. Ibid., 7.
22. Barthes, Roland Barthes, 116–17.
23. Homer, Iliad, 2.494–759.
24. Melville, Moby-Dick, 294.
25. Another, similar ad appeared in 1986. The “Coke Is It!” campaign
itself began in 1982. The two ads can be found at http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=bR7Wj9qnwaM and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zFPc
WsmH1g, respectively.
26. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdB7GDZY3Pk. Carl Wil-
lat’s website is http://www.carlsfinefilms.com. Lyrics are copyright 2009 by
Carl Willat.
27. Blanciak, Siteless, 4–5.
28. Lynch, “Ontography,” 7.
29. Shore’s photographic selectiveness was partly constrained by the
high cost of 8x10 plates.
30. Prints can be found in Lange, Fried, and Sternfeld, Stephen Shore,
10, 82. The first two examples were earlier images captured with a smaller
Rollei instead of the larger view cameras discussed above.
31. Cotter, “A World unto Itself.”
32. Ibid., 11.
33. Ibid., 87.
34. Harman, Quadruple Object, 124.
35. Ibid., 125.
36. Walton, Technical Data Requirements, 170.
37. For more on the tight coupling of skin and mechanics, see Bogost,
Persuasive Games, 40–51.
38. Good, “All 22,802 Words in Scribblenauts.”
39. A complete list of merits can be found at http://www.scribblenauts
guide.com/page/Scribblenauts+Merits.
40. Totilo, “16 Attempts at Scribblenauts.”
41. Aristotle, Physics, book 5.

3. me taphorism
1. Latour, Pasteurization of France, 215.
2. Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” 435–50. The question was origi-
nally posed by the physicalist critic Timothy Sprigge, although Nagel made
it famous.
3. Indeed, the molecular process by which the sensation of sweetness
occurs remains somewhat mysterious, and a subject of considerable inquiry
in contemporary organic chemistry.
 [ 142 ] Notes

4. Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” 436.

5. Ibid., 438.
6. Ibid., 442.
7. Ibid., 439.
8. Ibid., 447.
9. Ibid., 449.
10. Ibid.
11. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 120.
12. Ibid., 438.
13. Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, 3.
14. Ibid., 150.
15. Ibid., 98.
16. Ibid., 94.
17. Epstein, Genis, and Vladiv-Glover, Russian Postmodernism, 105.
18. Quoted in Epstein, Genis, and Vladiv-Glover, Russian Postmodern-
ism, 138.
19. Epstein, Genis, and Vladiv-Glover, Russian Postmodernism, 106.
20. Zhdanov, “Oblast’ nerazmennogo vladen’ia . . . ,” 63. Quoted in
Epstein, Genis, and Vladiv-Glover, Russian Postmodernism, 138.
21. Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, 153. “Real object” is a technical
term for Harman, who splits entities into the withdrawn, real objects and
the “sensual objects” that enter into relation.
22. Epstein, After the Future, 41.
23. Husserl, Husserliana (19), 437.
24. From my own tests: at ISO 200, color and saturation shifts are
not noticeable; at ISO 400, red shifts toward yellow by about 17 degrees.
Green shifts toward cyan slightly and desaturates by around 20 percent;
at ISO 800, red shifts toward yellow by about 28 degrees. Green shifts
away from cyan slightly, perhaps by 5 degrees, but desaturates almost
entirely.
25. Maurer, “Reality and Digital Pictures.”
26. From the question and answer session in a presentation of work at
MIT in 1974. The University of California, Riverside has archived an audio
recording of the session at http://cmplab16.ucr.edu/podcasts/2008.0009.0003/
UCR_CMP_Podcasts_CollectionsSeries2.m4a. I am grateful to Ted Papa-
george for sharing this recording with me.
27. http://twitter.com/ibogost/status/5928090585.
28. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 89.
29. Latour, Pasteurization of France, 197.
30. Ibid., 227.
31. Levinas, Time and the Other, 90.
 a

plate 1. (a) Stephen Shore, New York City, 1972; (b) Stephen Shore, Rolla,
Missouri, 1972; (c) Stephen Shore, Room 28 Holiday Inn, Medicine Hat,
Alberta, 1974. Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York.
plate 2. Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, 1975.
Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York.
plate 3. Stephen Shore, Perrine, Florida, November 11, 1977.
Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York.
plate 4. Stephen Shore, Trail’s End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973.
Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York.
plate 5. As the Foveon sensor’s light sensitivity is amplified, the images it records
exhibit color shifts. Taking the ISO 100 image at top right as a baseline, by ISO 400
red shifts toward yellow, and green both shifts toward cyan and desaturates slightly.
At ISO 800, red shifts even farther toward yellow, and green desaturates almost entirely.
plate 6. A Bayer sensor (top) interprets colors by combining results from
an array of photocells that are sensitive to a single color (red, green, or blue).
In a Foveon sensor (bottom), the silicon is photosensitive to different wave-
lengths of light at different layers of the individual photocells.
plate 7. I Am TIA is a work of carpentry that
metaphorizes the experience of an Atari television
interface adapter (TIA). At top is the reference
image, a screen from Combat (1977). The black dot
shows the current position of the electron gun on
the television display, the darkened area above it
having already been traversed. At bottom are six
screens sampled from the output I Am TIA would
display just after this moment, its internal circuitry
choosing the topmost object’s color and adjusting
its signal accordingly.
plate 8. Two of many possible visual states of Tableau Machine,
a computational “alien presence” that characterizes a home’s
perception through abstract art. Reproduced courtesy of Adam Smith,
Mario Romero, Zach Pousman, and Michael Mateas.