The Body of the Bit
Most people treat digital files as ephemeral, weightless ideas. Forensic Materialism argues the opposite: every file has a "body." This body consists of the specific encoding (UTF-8 vs ASCII), the file header that identifies its type, and the "slack space" on the hard drive where its remnants might linger. When we analyze a file forensically, we are looking at the materiality of the code.
By studying the materiality, we can uncover history that the "content" hides. A text document might claim to be from 2024, but its metadata reveals it was created in 1998 on an old Macintosh. This is the "fingerprint" of the digital object.
Tracing Friction
Every time a file is moved, copied, or compressed, it encounters friction. This friction leaves marks—pixelation in a JPEG, extra padding in a database, or header changes in a network packet. Forensic Materialism is the discipline of reading these marks to understand the artifact's journey through time.