Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (The MIT Press)

word "object" is pressed into service to capture both of the last two manifestations of the work: that is, the work as a particular or discrete artifact, and the work as one side of a continuous support.

The student of formal materiality will immediately note the fact that markup's fundamental quality is that it models text with more text.

play of code is not alwaysinfinitely fungible and arbitrary-transformations are not always reversible, nor are all transformations always possible or achievable.

result of prior formal activity

I would argue that the tendency to regard one image as correct and the other as deviant is to misapprehend the nature of computers as digital systems, and indeed allographic sign systems in general

Formal materiality emerges out of the process of establishing and transforming these variable representational states such that some are arbitrarily naturalized in relation to others, even as the allographic play of symbolic permutations is itself constrained as a

information routinely slips from a formal to a forensic materiality and back again.

"Volatility," the authors go on to note, "is an artifact of the abstractions that make computer systems useful"

Information becomes more volatile (and more usable or available) as it becomes more abstract because it is more susceptible to the basic operators of allographic manipulation, deftly pinpointed by Kari M. Kraus as substitution, deletion, insertion, transposition, relocation, and repetition.33