Gutenberg’s great invention was not the system of printing so much as the alloy of lead, tin, and antimony used to make the type. The value of his invention was the material used to convey information more than the structure.
I applied heat to metal type and melted it, then poured it into the mold of a record to create a weighty, metal phonograph record. The heavy record starts up slowly, and then takes a long time to slow down and stop due to the force of inertia.
The type and the record contain the same information, and are made from the same material. When it changed form, what about it changed, and what stayed the same? (Text and audio from Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”)