The use of application programming interfaces (APIs) to develop and design technological forms of structured exchanges is an increasingly prevalent practice at present, allowing data to be shared, automated, circulated and redistributed in wider computational culture. Despite acting as key infrastructural elements and connectors, the prominence and importance of APIs is still under recognised. Via a brief survey of the history of API development and then closer regulatory and technical analysis of the long standing, non-profit net.art generator (nag) (1997), this study aims to bring to the fore key sociotechnical elements of API design. Particular attention is given to protocological forms of control as these can be enacted through APIs via the regulations, terms of service and specific operational processes and affordances of fetching networked data. net.art generator uses the Google API and URL and specific attention is given to Google’s setting of terms for exchange. In doing so, we give a few suggestions for how anyone working with APIs might think through certain key questions around the creation and use of APIs, particularly in regards to the parameters of openness, accessibility and terms of inclusivity that APIs set upon practices of knowing, sharing, participation and exchange.

The use of application programming interfaces (APIs) to develop and design technological forms of structured exchanges is an increasingly prevalent practice at present, allowing data to be shared, automated, circulated and redistributed in wider computational culture. Despite acting as key infrastructural elements and connectors, the prominence and importance of APIs is still under recognised. Via a brief survey of the history of API development and then closer regulatory and technical analysis of the long standing, non-profit net.art generator (nag) (1997), this study aims to bring to the fore key sociotechnical elements of API design. Particular attention is given to protocological forms of control as these can be enacted through APIs via the regulations, terms of service and specific operational processes and affordances of fetching networked data. net.art generator uses the Google API and URL and specific attention is given to Google’s setting of terms for exchange. In doing so, we give a few suggestions for how anyone working with APIs might think through certain key questions around the creation and use of APIs, particularly in regards to the parameters of openness, accessibility and terms of inclusivity that APIs set upon practices of knowing, sharing, participation and exchange.

This paper is an investigation of how the specific design and materiality of the artefact of the boat, as well as the various material, visual, technical and geographical practices at work in the space of Mediterranean Sea, orientate a specific space and produce a selective politics of seeing, saving and framing of bodies on the move. It highlights how the very presence and movement of ‘unseaworthy boats’ in this actively orientated space of the sea brings to the fore the many strategies and techniques that have been employed to make it a space of European control. We argue that this is an active and deadly orientation carried out in an often dispersed number of practices and interventions within a seemingly flat space of water. The paper concludes that border transgressors’ act of moving by boat, with all of the losses involved, both challenge and potentially reorientate European mobility regimes.

This collection brings together artists, curators, programmers, theorists and heavy internet browsers whose practices make critical intervention into the broad concept of execution. It draws attention to their political strategies, asking: who and what is involved with those practices, and for whom or what are these practices performed, and how? From the contestable politics of emoji modifier mechanisms and micro-temporalities of computational processes to genomic exploitation and the curating of digital content, the chapters account for gendered, racialised, spatial, violent, erotic, artistic and other embedded forms of execution. Together they highlight a range of ways in which execution emerges and how it participates within networked forms of liveliness.

This research looks at questions of power and expression as they are composed in various ways within networked and computationally-informed situations of the present. Drawing from the term as it is originally invoked in practices of computing, the research puts forward execution as a central conceptual framework for its investigations. In a computer program, a program becomes executable when it is able to execute a set of procedures within a designated set of relations and affordances. Similarly, the concept of execution developed here looks at the ongoing negotiations of various formative relations and affordances (technical, cultural, material, political) in practices of execution, describing certain notable techniques applied towards the task of making things executable.

The examples looked at include several dominant media and technology practices of the present, as well as several alternative practices that point to other possible modes of execution. In doing so, the research highlights certain politically-orientated issues involved in questions of execution, working to further develop specific approaches aimed at describing, questioning and intervening into practices of execution as they occur in the world.