The Material Of Invention By Ezio Manzini.

"Material is being "intellectualized" - this is the amazinf new development at the end of the twentieth century; the terms "material" and "invention" are beginning to coincide.

The medium can become a "warehouse" thanks to possible ferromagnetism: the impulse received is registered and stored. It will be sufficient to code the messages in a binary system for the magnetized substrate to take on the role of unlimited and untiring "memory" If man forgets rapidly and deforms, the "conductor" preserves all that it is given. Ingenious assemblies connect the individual units. One can then draw inductions and consequences sums, implications, exclusions, differences ), the premises of artificial intelligence.

Without going that far, the technology of the camera obscura and the daguerreotype (end of the last century) was based on differential light sensitivity - the photosensitivity of silver salts or special thin emulsion that makes it possible to fix events and thus preserve them (graphic memory).
Beginning from the negative (where light appears black and the shadows white it is possible to obtain positive prints at will (talbot). And what copies: from the most precise (which register tiny details, where one can "count the hairs on a beard") to the most subjective (the silvery tenderness, the tones and atmosphere of old calotypes). It is as if the eye has been replaced by a machine , but above all the universe is inscribed in the film, where it is perpetuated and "reflected" in representation (image).

From the Material Of Invention by Ezio Manzini.
Page 15.