Partially Instantiated Object is a photograph, a digital Lambda print mounted on Diasec. The image consists simply of a text on a white background representing a runnable computer algorithm.

In object-oriented programming, instantiation occurs when a class, written instructions describing a thing, is transformed into a dynamic, usable ‘object’ at the moment the program is executed. An object can be most anything in a program that stores data and has agency, from graphical user interface elements, to moving image and text, to more abstract entities such as ports, buffers or parsers. Every instantiated object shares the properties and methods delineated in its class, which functions as a sort of blueprint, but initial parameters can potentially confer radically different behavior and appearance to each unique instance. In this respect, instantiation can be thought of as the passage from the general to the particular, from the description of latent processes to individuated, active forms.

The readable program in Partially Instantiated Object is a consolidation and rewriting of disparate code fragments taken from the Processing project source code in view of creating an autonomous and workable camera class. If executed on a digital computer, this class, based on what is known in computer graphics as the Pinhole Camera Model, would be instantiated as a perspectival point of view, a mobile vantage point in an empty three-dimensional space. But instead of becoming an actionable viewport, here it has been materialized within the surface of a thickly mounted digital photograph, whose waning indexical function has been increasingly superseded by the future tense of programming and the fundamental mutability of digital media.