Mary Flanagan's [collection] searches the hard drives of computer's on a local area network for information like emails, pictures and cached web pages. Bits and pieces of this material are then rendered three dimensionally and float through a window on the user's screen.

Mary Flanagan's stated intent was to investigate the nature of memory, but the piece also brings up issues of privacy. She makes sure that her piece will not invade anyone's hard drive without them being aware of it or cause harm. [collection] only accesses the computers of users who have also installed the software, and never damages any files. Nevertheless, this piece raises concerns about surrveilance. Flanagan protects computer users on a network from unauthorized intrusion, but we can imagine that the safe-guards didn't need to be there. And, perhaps we will regret giving [collection] access to our hard drives once we've done so. What have we forgotten there? What will it find?