Throughout the history of patent law, the way an invention is represented has influenced the process of the patent office in its prosecution. This article traces how changes in the representation of an invention—from material to text to digital—transformed into patent prosecution. Early inventions were represented by working models, an incarnated invention that needed little or no examination by the patent office, as the inventions themselves were. Substantive examination became necessary when the depiction of the invention shifted from material to text, the point in history at which the invention became harmonized and represented by the patent specification, the written document that includes the invention. Aside from bringing crucial changes in patent prosecution, coordinated invention has centralized patent office operations. With the adoption of new technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), the way invention is represented will undergo another change that will lead to the further development of patent pursuit. Like digital photography that changed the representation of images by radically changing the background process, digital invention will change the back-process of the patent office, i.e. patent prosecution. The most important methodological consequence of invention digitization will be the decentralization of the patent system.