Digital Inscription

“Visibility itself is not a measure of inscription, modification of the substratum is.”

—Marcos Novak, Trans Terra Form

This is a photograph (you can click to enlarge) that I took of one of my old 5.25” floppy disks that I treated with MagView developer fluid (a magnetic iron suspension in aerosol format). The MagView makes visible to the unaided eye the concentric recording tracks on disk’s surface—the same geometry used on your hard drive, albeit at much higher densities.

Can’t see them? Look closely, particularly in the boxed area. They’re faint, but you’re looking for something very much like the grooves on the surface of an old vinyl record. That’s the mark of the data.