Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination

You Are Your C”

The impulse toward equating subjective identity with personal data stores is emerging as one of the most dramatic features of contemporary discourse networks. “You are your C,” proclaims title of a net art project by Carlo Zanni, dedicated to “electronic soul mirroring.” When the project is accessed online, the contents of the viewer’s hard drive are displayed on the screen as the standard Windows file tree, as though they were simply another component of the World Wide Web. “Eyes are no more the soul mirror of a person; on the contrary the computer or the hard disk are.”⁴⁵ (The “C” refers to the conventional mapping for a hard drive mounted on a Windows file system—the hard drive is the “C” drive, or, interestingly, the “see” drive; note also Zanni’s play on soul/sole.) The project is straightforward enough, but the dialectic between screen and storage, reflections and reservoirs, is instructive; as Zanni notes, the fear of having one’s private information exposed, made visible on the Web is an explicit dimension of the work: “It is an old hacker trick . . . usually people were thinking that the visualization was available for all the web audience, in truth it was only available in local for your machine.”⁴⁶ Clearly for Zanni, life on the screen manifests a sometimes uneasy relationship to the life on the disk.

Indeed, there are indications that hard drive-specific net art projects are becoming their own minor genre. Mary Flanagan’s forensically inflected [Phage] (2000) uses fragments of old media files residing on the user’s hard disk to construct a 3-D representation of the computer’s supposed “unconscious.” Executed in VRML, images are texture mapped onto geometric solids, creating startling visual extrusions that drift like Dalían phantasmagoria. She calls the basic process a virus.⁴⁷ Likewise, Cory Arcangel’s net art Data Diaries (2002) uses Quicktime video to stream ambient data files obtained by a core dumping of his hard drive’s various buffers and memory caches, yielding abstract atonal video compositions keyed to specific calendar days: “If ever computers had a subconscious, this is it,” writes Alex Galloway. “They look like digital dreams—the pure shapes and tones of real computer memory. Each video documents a new day, and each day the computer offers us a new set of memories.”⁴⁸ In fact, however, the conceit of a window onto a computer’s anthropomorphized unconscious or subconscious is an idealized fiction. VRML and Quicktime are both high-end production environments, and the visual and aural experiences that each has the capacity to generate are as much as anything else an artifact of their own formal particulars. Taken together, [Phage] and Digital Diaries embody some very different behaviors and conceits: the former is “interactive” and to some extent immersive and open-ended, the latter is simply a clip that one watches to completion. Digital Diaries adopts a very deliberate authorial persona, though we might ask what role we, the viewer, are cast in—mere voyeur, or is the point to sensitize us to the secret lives of whatever machine is now under our fingertips, interiors equally rich yet somehow distinct? [Phage], for its part, asks us to accept the conceit of a virus, an artificial life form, and plays off of common fears about spectacularly destructive intrusions into our data sanctuaries. This virus, by contrast, is generative, delivering up the pleasures of the work by recycling our digital detritus. What is conspicuous in both projects, however, is that storage—to the exclusion of the CPU or any other portion of the computer’s architecture—becomes the locus of identity and the soul of the new machine.

Early RAMAC disk arrays were often proudly displayed: at the United Airlines terminal at Stapleton Field in Denver, visitors were allowed to observe the machine as it recorded and retrieved their reservations in a dedicated glass-walled room (the actress Eva Gabor was reportedly mesmerized).⁴⁹ By the time they became a standard part of personal computer systems, hard drives had already retreated inside the case, and are now further dematerializing as a consequence of their soaring capacities. At the same time, storage is more visible than it’s been in quite some time, accentuated by the sleek white contours of the iPod or the day-glo colors of Flash memory sticks.⁵⁰ Indeed, the suddenly ubiquitous memory sticks are perhaps the first storage media capable of accessorizing with apparel. Just as cell phones and MP3 players now have their holsters, memory sticks are made with pocket clips (hearkening back to the pocket protectors of old), while others come with nylon sports bands so that the stick can be slung around the neck, often as not to ride there alongside of a photo ID pendant (access and storage becoming tangled and intertwined during a brisk stride around the downtown at the lunch hour). Today being wired means being well-outfitted, whether it’s with a cellular earpiece (to stay in touch) or iPod ear buds (to stay well-informed with a PodCast, or else just to rock out, with the latest MP3 to hit the music blogs). More novel storage accessories are also available: Flash memory bundled in a pair of earrings for example, or day-glo plastic wrist bracelets, or an executive fountain pen.⁵¹ If a decade ago storage was confined to the desktop and a handful of immediately ancillary devices (Jazz and Zip, the CD-ROM, even the odd floppy) nowadays it’s more distributed, more intimate, and more mobile—in a word, more fashionable. Storage now has a generation gap, as is perhaps captured in a Web page that instructs readers in how to turn their old hard drives into wind chimes suitable for porch-hanging.⁵²

“My Computer”: I remember my own first encounter with a computer hard drive. I had grown up using an Apple IIe, and was accustomed to swapping 5.25-inch disks in and out of my system’s two external Disk II floppy drives whenever I wanted to use a new application or save some data. The first time I saved a file to a hard drive (on a PC at school) was a very different kind of experience: there was no diskette to label and pocket, nothing for me to take back home after class. My work was suddenly somehow part of the computer itself, not shunted back out to peripheral media. The computer was no longer just a processing engine sandwiched between input and output devices but something more like an individualized entity, with its own unique internal memory. In a roomful of otherwise identical-looking terminals I could point to one in particular and say, “that’s my computer” (the very phrase Microsoft would eventually use to label for the desktop icon that allows users to browse their file systems). Of course from an architectural standpoint nothing had really changed and personal computers still conformed very much to the classic von Neumann model. The storage device had simply retreated inside the case. But the psychological impact of saving data “inside” the machine, rather than to some external locale, cannot overlooked, and is, I believe, in its own way, as significant as the advent of the GUI, the more commonly celebrated revolution of that era.

1^ Quoted in Brian Armstrong-Hélouvry, Control of Machines with Friction (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 1.

2^ Simson L. Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat, “Remembrance of Data Past: A Study of Disk Sanitization Practices.” IEEE Security and Privacy (January-February 2003): 17-27. Also available online: http://www.computer.org/security/garfinkel.pdf.

3^ One recent exception appears to be an issue of the journal Mediamatric on “Storage Mania” edited by Geert Lovink, under the sign of Kittler: http://www.mediamatic.net/article-200.5944.html. Lev Manovich makes passing mention of a “database complex,” an “irrational desire to preserve and store everything” (274) but for him storage seems to collapse into the data structures of the database, rather than actual storage devices themselves. The history of computer storage media has also been well chronicled in corporate histories of the computer industry. See Charles J. Bashe, Lyle R. Johnson, John H. Palmer, and Emerson W. Pugh, IBM’s Early Computers (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), and Edmund W. Pugh, Lyle R. Johnson, and John H. Palmer, IBM’s 360 and Early 370 Systems (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).

4^ The aural dimension of our experience of hard drives is not to be underestimated. Hard drive manufacturers routinely make recordings of sounds made by failing drives available online, so users can learn to recognize them in time to back up their data. In at least one instance, these have been remixed as techno compositions, with titles like “Crizzash” and “Drive Time (Jane’s Book of Computer Disaster’s Mix)”: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/announcements/hard-drive-dying-dance-track-winner-151666.php. At my local Apple Store not long ago, I observed a technician diagnose an ailing hard drive by taking a laptop into the back room (where it was quiet) and listening to it for a minute or two. Nor should this be an unfamiliar phenomenon. Jay Clayton, in a perceptive critique of Friedrich Kittler’s idiosyncratic historiography (which gives short shift to communications over storage technologies), points to the profound importance of the sound of the machine among early telegraph operators: “Every nineteenth century book on the telegraph contains sections on the wonders of reading by sound” (65). See his Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 64-70.

5^ Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines.

6^ Yet error or global failure is often what brings the drive’s materiality into brute force focus. A student offers this story of a friend who revived her dying hard drive long enough for her to get vital data off of it: “Here is what he did: took out the hard drive, put it in a ziploc, and stuck it in the freezer overnight.  The metal contracts, and when you take it back out, it expands at different rates (for the different types of metal), allowing stuck bearings to come unstuck and non-spinning heads to spin up one last time.” Personal email to the author from Jess Henig, August 20, 2004, 12:28 PM.

7^ My account of “Professor RAMAC” is heavily indebted to Mitchell E. Morris’s historical article on the subject, “Professor RAMAC’s Tenure,” published in the industry magazine Datamation (April 1981): 195-8. I would like to acknowledge Paul E. Ceruzzi’s A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998) as my source for the initial citation to Morris.

8^ IBM’s first corporate client took delivery on a RAMAC in June, 1956—perhaps ironically it went to the Zellerbach Paper Company in San Francisco.

9^ http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html.

10^ As was prefigured by earlier advances in storage. In the case of the UNIVAC, its revolutionary character was manifest to the end user less in its implementation of the stored program concept or the speed of its processor than, as Ceruzzi notes, in its magnetic tape storage system: “To the extent that its customers perceived the UNIVAC as an ‘electronic brain’ it was because it ‘knew’ where to find the desired data on a tape, could wind or rewind the tape to that place, and could extract (or record) data automatically” (30).

11^ See The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).

12^ Paul N. Edwards, in chapter 3 of his important The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) argues that the Air Force’s billion-dollar SAGE air defense network (developed and deployed from 1954-1961) was the first real-time computer system, hence the birth of interactive computing. SAGE was certainly the first real-time distributed computer system, and not coincidently, was instrumental in refining the performance of magnetic core memories, then the primary alternative to magnetic disk for random access storage. Moreover, SAGE operators used light pens to plot aircraft movements on the cathode ray tubes that were the first implementation of a real-time screen display. SAGE’s significance to the history of both hardware and software cannot be overstated; as Edwards documents in detail, the demands of a real-time command and control network definitively tipped the balance of government funding in favor of digital over analog computation. See also Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 49-53, and for a discussion of the importance of SAGE to the history of software Martin Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 36-41. I would argue, however, that Edwards overlooks the simultaneous importance of the demand for inventory and production control solutions in both the military and commercial sectors as a catalyst for real-time computing, expressed in particular, as I hope to show, through IBM’s development and marketing of the RAMAC.

13^ Morris, “Professor RAMAC’s Tenure,” 198.

14^ New York: Wiley, 1950.

15^ English, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, German, and Russian. That these were also all alphabetic languages compatible with the rudimentary text processing technology of the day reinforces rather than diminishes the point.

16^ The Professor is probably even more aptly described as an ancestor to systems like BASEBALL, an “automatic question answerer” from the early 1960s that was capable of offering up vast stores of baseball trivia. See Nick Montfort, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 81.

17^ Jacob Rabinow, “The Notched-Disk Memory,” Electrical Engineering (August 1952): 745-9.

18^ Terry Belanger of the University of Virginia Rare Book School informs me of the following: “In the RBS collections is a ‘book,’ which consists of a 1/4" stack of 2" paper disks, with a spiral binding around the entire circumference (with the result that the book cannot be opened). Its ‘titlepage’ (the top disk) has a single word on it: ‘unbound.’” Personal email Wed, 10 Sep 2003 14:07:07.

19^ I’m thinking here of Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Duke UP, 2000) and Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book: Technology—Schizophrenia—Electric Speech (U of Nebraska P, 1989). See also Gitelman (1999) and Kittler (1999) for discussions of automatic writing.

20^ Johnson would later remark: “. . . I would be free to choose projects to work on. One half of my projects were to be new products and one-half were to be devices in support of customers’ special engineering needs. No projects were to be duplicates of work in progress at other IBM laboratories. The laboratory was to be dedicated to innovation.” Quoted in Eric D. Daniel, C. Denis Mee, and Mark H. Clark, Magnetic Recording: The First One Hundred Years (New York: IEEE Press, 1999), 273.

21^ Quoted in Bashe, Johnson, Palmer, and Pugh, IBM’s Early Computers, 231.

22^ Brian Hayes, “Terabyte Territory.” American Scientist 90 (May-June): 212-6. Hayes adds that the paint was first filtered through a silk stocking and then “poured onto the spinning disk from a Dixie cup” (212).

23^ See Bashe, et al., 279.

24^ According to Ceruzzi, “automation,” as articulated by John Diebold, consisted in the application of cybernetic feedback mechanisms to business and the industrial workplace (32). Its proponents quickly embraced the UNIVAC and the new generation of general purpose digital computers.

25^ Indeed, there is much productive work to be done by scholars at the interface between paper and electronic systems during this early era of data processing. In the same 1956 press release as the RAMAC, for example, Watson announced a programmable electric typewriter, a remarkable reading and writing machine described in the following terms: “An electronic ‘reading’ device has been added to the IBM electric typewriter so that typists will no longer have to set tabulating stops while filling in the hundreds of different varieties of forms that are used every day in a business office. Business forms will be printed with vertical lines of electrically-conductive ink associated with each blank fill-in area for which the typist would normally set the tab. These lines, in effect, program the typewriter. No matter what variety of form the typist rolls into the machine, the tabs will be automatically set. All the typist need do is operate the tab key, and the machine, ‘reading’ the lines on the form, will position the carriage before the next fill-in area. The new typewriter will sell for $520.” Henry W. Reis, Jr., sales manager of IBM’s Electric Typewriter Division, added “Our endowing the typewriter with an ‘electronic intelligence’ is just one of the many strides we will make as we continue to incorporate scientific developments into the typewriter of the future.” See http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html.

26^ http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html.

27^ For a succinct overview of this phenomenon, see Sharon Gumari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 31-5.

28^ In Gumari-Tabrizi.

29^ These are, of course, what are generally accepted as the first messages or recordings for the telegraph, the phonograph, and the telephone, respectively. The first email message was sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971; it bears the distinctive markings of another writing technology: “QWERTYUIOP.” The hard drive’s “This has been a day of solid achievement” is documented in Reynold B. Johnson’s talk to the DataStorage ’89 Conference, September 19, 1989, San Jose, California: http://www.mdhc.scu.edu/100th/reyjohnson.htm. Bashe, et al. corroborate this as the date for the first successful read/write operation, but do not provide the text of the message (287).

30^ We do often speak of putting a file on a disk. Likewise, “saving to” and “saving on” a disk appear to be used with about equal frequency. Since it is clear that we can thereby conceive of disks or other storage media as a form of material support for data, it becomes all the more conspicuous that we only seldom speak of writing a file on a disk. The OED helps chart this lexical unease: in the 1940s, one could comfortably say either write “on” or write “to” tape or disk (or indeed, more commonly, write “into”). Since the 1950s, however, the preferred locution has been simply “to.”

31^ See paragraph 41 in “Friedrich Kittler’s Media Scenes—An Instruction Manual.” Postmodern Culture (September 1999): http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.999/10.1.r_ogorman.txt .

32^ See Larry McCaffery, Storming the Reality Studio (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Likewise, in the afterword to the Voyager Press electronic edition of his first three novels: “I bought [an Apple] IIc in an end-of-line sale at a department store, took it home, and learned, to my considerable disappointment, that personal computers stored their data on little circular bits of electromagnetic tape, which were whirled around to the accompaniment of assorted coarse sounds. I suppose I'd assumed the data was just sort of, well, held. In a glittering mesh of silicon. Or something. But silently.” Available online: http://163.152.22.77/shim/monalisa.htm.

33^ The quotation is from “The Word Processor,” an interview with Derrida conducted by Béatrice and Louis Seguin for La Quinzaine Littéraire in August 1996. Reprinted in Derrida’s Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005): 19-32.

34^ I want to make explicit my debt to one resource in particular in the section that follows, the online PC Guide, written and maintained by Charles M. Kozierok, which offers by far the most detailed non-specialist’s discussion I know of the components and operation of a hard disk drive: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/. I have benefited a great deal from Mr. Kozierok’s expertise, and that knowledge is applied throughout this section.

35^ But it is not necessarily the case that the random access paradigm will endure indefinitely: at least one leading practitioner, Jim Gray, head of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center, foresees a return to sequential access as drives scale up past the terabyte threshold: “Certainly we have to convert from random disk access to sequential access patterns. Disks will give you 200 accesses per second, so if you read a few kilobytes in each access, you're in the megabyte-per-second realm, and it will take a year to read a 20-terabyte disk. If you go to sequential access of larger chunks of the disk, you will get 500 times more bandwidth—you can read or write the disk in a day. So programmers have to start thinking of the disk as a sequential device rather than a random access device.” See “A Conversation with Jim Gray”: http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=43 .

36^ See http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/08/bookshaped_hard_driv.html.

37^ In point of fact, read and write heads are no longer the same entity. The development of first magnetoresistive heads and then giant magnetoresistive heads—in 1991 and 1997 respectively—forced the creation of a separate read head, based on substances whose electrical resistance changes in the presence of a magnetic field. The introduction of magnetoresitive heads led to dramatic increases in aerial density (Hayes 214-5).

38^ Some readers may suggest that a book is only incidentally volumetric, since more pages can always be added to accommodate additional content. This is true in a very generic sense, but students of printing history and bibliography will know that counter-examples are everywhere once one gets arrives on the shop floor: in the hand-press period, for example, compositors were known to have changed the spelling of words to make them conform to the length of a line. Nearly all mass-produced books are printed in signatures, very large pages that are then cut and folded into individual leaves. Authors are often asked to add or remove content so as to bring their raw page counts into alignment with the multiples of a signature. Word processing and desktop publishing software, meanwhile, typically offers a “Make It Fit” feature that will take a few stray words alone at the end of a document and format them on the preceding page. These quick examples, from early modern to contemporary desktop publishing, indicate that the codex is volumetric in all three of its dimensions, length, breadth, and depth.

39^ This is a simplification. FAT is actually a family of technologies, and the actual implementations include FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, and VFAT. On more recent systems such as Windows 2000 and XP, FAT is replaced by a technology known as NTFS. And, of course, neither UNIX nor Macintosh computers use FAT all; they have their own file system technologies.

40^ For a good discussion of the codex as a random access device (by way of comparison to the linear scroll), see Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy J. Vickers in their editors’ introduction to Language Machines: Technologies of Liteary and Cultural Production (Routledge 1997): 1-14.

41^ However, there are experimental hard drives with no moving parts. IRAM, for example: http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/gigabyte-iram/index.x?pg=1. (My thanks to Will Killeen for this reference.)

42^ The speed at which the disk rotates around the spindle remains one of the critical bottlenecks in hard drive development. At least one British firm, Dataslide, is experimenting with using vibration instead of the disk’s spinning motion to generate the movement necessary for read/write heads to detect magnetic fluctuation changes. See http://www.dataslide.com/, particularly the articles listed in the “News” section.

43^ I am grateful to Kari Kraus for suggesting “planographic” as one of the hard drive’s grammatological primitives.

44^ For an overview of the current state of the art, see Margaret Quan, “Holographic storage nears debut,” EE Times, April 26, 2001: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010423S0113.

45^ Artist’s statement online at Rhizome.org Artbase.

46^ Personal email from Zanni to author, 8 Jan 2005 19:47:53 +0100.

47^ [Phage] can be found here: < http://www.maryflanagan.com/virus.htm>.

48^ See http://www.turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/ . Alex Galloway’s remarks are available in his introduction to the piece: http://www.turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/alex.php .

49^ Morris, 196.

50^ As of this writing, Apple has released its first Flash memory-based iPods; as Flash memory devices continue to proliferate and improve they will compete for the portable market and perhaps force hard drives back inside the protective environs of the case.

51^http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30384 and http://www.pny.com/products/flash/execattache.asp, respectively. My thanks to Will Killeen for these links.

52^ http://halogen.note.amherst.edu/~wing/wingie/tech/hdchime/hdchime.php.

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