What if platform edges, the tightly controlled programmatic access points and terminal interfaces, were not the most important ways to approach platforms? A different departure point lies elsewhere: in light and images. Images open some paths towards platform grounding, in view of their high level of artifice, the heavy investments in value regimes associated with images, and their entwining with particular images or bodies.

As in other chapters in this book, an experimental ontology centres on grounded or place-based relations. Locating the grounding of platforms in images is hard. One statement of the difficulty appears in Bruno Latour's account of ‘digital infrastructure’:

At core, the difficulty is not that older techniques of inscription of speech and images have disconnected from platforms (‘digital infrastructure’), but the ‘bodily apparatus’ is not ‘right’. How did even one thing become an image? What dependencies and affiliations does the imbrication of images in ensembles entail?