Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination

by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Overview

A new “textual studies” and archival approach to the investigation of works of new media and electronic literature that applies techniques of computer forensics to conduct media-specific readings of William Gibson's electronic poem “Agrippa,” Michael Joyce's Afternoon, and the interactive game Mystery House.

In Mechanisms, Matthew Kirschenbaum examines new media and electronic writing against the textual and technological primitives that govern writing, inscription, and textual transmission in all media: erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability. Mechanisms is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to storage—the hard drive in particular—arguing that understanding the affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new media. Drawing a distinction between “forensic materiality” and “formal materiality,” Kirschenbaum uses applied computer forensics techniques in his study of new media works. Just as the humanities discipline of textual studies examines books as physical objects and traces different variants of texts, computer forensics encourage us to perceive new media in terms of specific versions, platforms, systems, and devices. Kirschenbaum demonstrates these techniques in media-specific readings of three landmark works of new media and electronic literature, all from the formative era of personal computing: the interactive fiction game Mystery House, Michael Joyce's Afternoon: A Story, and William Gibson's electronic poem “Agrippa.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262517409
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	01/06/2012
Series:	The MIT Press
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and the author of the award-winning Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press).

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: "Awareness of the Mechanism" 1

1 "Every Contact Leaves a Trace": Storage, Inscription, and Computer Forensics 25

2 Extreme Inscription: A Grammatology of the Hard Drive 73

3 "An Old House with Many Rooms": The Textual Forensics of Mystery_House.Dsk 111

4 Save As: Michael Joyce's Afternoons 159

5 Text Messaging: The Transformissions of "Agrippa" 213

Coda: The Forensic Imagination 249

Appendix 261

Works Cited 265

Index 279

What People are Saying About This

Alan Liu

"Kirschenbaum's book is the most rigorous, cohesive,
historically-informed, materially grounded, and theoretically interesting treatment of the nature of text in the age of digital mutation that I have yet encountered.
The book introduces completely new materials and unique archival and site-specific research within an innovative methodological framework blending the new textual scholarship with the equally new discipline of digital forensics. In essence,
Kirschenbaum argues that digital texts may be strange things, but they are assuredly things soliciting the same level of material and theoretical inquiry that has driven the recent burst of interest in the history of the book and media archaeology.
Mechanisms is destined to be a landmark work for the field of digital textual studies in the same way that Lev Manovitch's Language of New Media was for the digital arts and new media fields."--Alan Liu, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara

Endorsement

Kirschenbaum's book is the most rigorous, cohesive, historically-informed, materially grounded, and theoretically interesting treatment of the nature of text in the age of digital mutation that I have yet encountered. The book introduces completely new materials and unique archival and site-specific research within an innovative methodological framework blending the new textual scholarship with the equally new discipline of digital forensics. In essence, Kirschenbaum argues that digital texts may be strange things, but they are assuredly things soliciting the same level of material and theoretical inquiry that has driven the recent burst of interest in the history of the book and media archaeology. Mechanisms is destined to be a landmark work for the field of digital textual studies in the same way that Lev Manovitch's Language of New Media was for the digital arts and new media fields.

—Alan Liu, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara

From the Publisher

At last in Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms we have our tactical plan for thinking inside the black box of digital media, for moving past 'screen studies' to a new take on electronic media informed by deep understanding of technological practices of inscription and storage. Kirschenbaum introduces a fresh and enlightening dichotomy, that of the interplay of formal and forensic inscription. This dichotomy becomes the raw material for cutting the key to a new critical apparatus for unlocking studies of digital media.

—Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, Germanic Collections, and Film & Media Collections, Stanford University Libraries

Kirschenbaum's book is the most rigorous, cohesive, historically-informed, materially grounded, and theoretically interesting treatment of the nature of text in the age of digital mutation that I have yet encountered. The book introduces completely new materials and unique archival and site-specific research within an innovative methodological framework blending the new textual scholarship with the equally new discipline of digital forensics. In essence, Kirschenbaum argues that digital texts may be strange things, but they are assuredly things soliciting the same level of material and theoretical inquiry that has driven the recent burst of interest in the history of the book and media archaeology. Mechanisms is destined to be a landmark work for the field of digital textual studies in the same way that Lev Manovitch's Language of New Media was for the digital arts and new media fields.

—Alan Liu, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara

Henry Lowood

"At last in Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms we have our tactical plan for thinking inside the black box of digital media, for moving past 'screen studies' to a new take on electronic media informed by deep understanding of technological practices of inscription and storage. Kirschenbaum introduces a fresh and enlightening dichotomy, that of the interplay of formal and forensic inscription.
This dichotomy becomes the raw material for cutting the key to a new critical apparatus for unlocking studies of digital media."--Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, Germanic Collections, and Film
& Media Collections, Stanford University Libraries