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

objects can be algorithmically individualized.

thick textuality as a potential model of critical practice; a model encompassing both screen-level text and machine-level instructions, embracing both normal interaction with the game and activities closer to hacking or cracking, and ultimately demonstrating a distinction between what I will term forensic and formal materiality.

Computers were thus understood as instruments of prediction and prognostication, not retrospection.

All media are bound to the materialities of their particular forms, materialities that materialize in the shape of intellectual property,

contrary-it is the capacity of the material documents to record change that makes them such believable witnesses."57

intimately tied to the level of physical and formal abstraction with which it is expressed:

intended to disappear from sight, yet is one of the most stable and accessible

What is conspicuous in both projects is that storage-to the exclusion of the CPU or any other portion of the computer's architecture-is the locus of identity and the soul of the new machine.

By the time they became a standard part of personal computer systems, hard drives had already retreated