LONDON 2012: DISTRIBUTED IMAG(IN)INGS AND EXPLOITING PROTOCOL

he Olympic Games in London in 2012 is being built online as well as off through official and unofficial photographs which serve to position ‘2012’ within a discourse of legacy and participation. This paper looks at how network protocols can be addressed as what Bruno Latour would call ‘actants’, non-human actors that generate and discipline that visualisation within a particular network scopic regime (Jay, 1988). Following Galloway (2004), protocols such as JPEG/EXIF and XML can be seen as generating new scopic texts/practices around archive and openness which underpin 2012 ideologies of legacy and participation. The paper goes on to explore the potential of critical intervention in that regime using Benjamin’s model of writing history developed in The Arcades Project (1999).