Creative Cryptography

Poetic encodings

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105. Amy Suo Wu's Thunderclap (2017) employs steganography to distribute the suppressed work of Chinese anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen (1886–1920) through the medium of clothing accessories. The work co-opts shanzhai fashion (a style featuring nonsense English), together with QR codes, as a covert system to publish subversive writings for a Chinese context.

Brief

Create a digital system that encodes a message into a media object, and also provides a means of decoding it. Your system should be designed to hide information in plain sight—within images, text, video, sound, or physical forms. Think carefully about the specific information your system is designed to encode, and the significance of the relationship between this information and the medium that contains it. You may choose to encode text, data, code, images, music, or other information of your choosing. Present one or more examples of your system in use. This assignment can be tailored to focus on steganography (the act of hiding a message in another medium) or cryptography (the act of encoding a message).

Learning Objectives

Variations

Making It Meaningful

The advent of the written word created a need for secure communications, both for those in power and those who would oppose them. This need for secure messaging has long inspired techniques of cryptography, defined as the encoding of messages. Some historic cryptographic approaches rely on the use of pre-computational devices like the decoding wheel, the Polybius square, and the Enigma machine, while others use simple ciphers like the pigpen cipher, Morse code, Braille, or ROT13. For children, there can be a wholesome joy in exchanging secret messages with one's friends, and a thrill in the effort of unlocking and revealing them.

Steganography is the special cryptographic technique of concealing information within another media format. Early cryptographers like Sir Francis Bacon and William Friedman were fond of steganography, building systems to hide messages in music scores, photographs, and even flower arrangements. Digital technologies offer many possibilities for creative steganography. Unused pixels or bytes in files can be filled with invisible information, data can be transcoded into different media, and (as with acrostics) messages can be distributed across huge volumes of online communications.

The 2013 Snowden revelations confirmed that the US government was recording the online communications of the American public, and produced a collective realization that unencrypted communications across digital networks are inherently insecure. On the Internet, it is impossible to know if communications are intercepted, making the development of practical and reliable cryptographic technologies an ongoing urgent challenge.

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106. A botanical drawing of a flower by William and Elizebeth Friedman (1916) uses a bilateral cipher invented by Francis Bacon to encode “BACON” in the roots and the names of Elizabethan authors and books in the leaves.

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107. Maddy Varner's KARDASHIAN KRYPT (2014) is a steganographic Chrome extension that covertly encodes messages into (and decodes messages from) photographs of Kim Kardashian. The low-order bits of the image shown here contain text from “A Room of One's Own” by Virginia Woolf.

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108. Block Bills (2017) by Matthias Dörfelt (Moka) is a collection of 64 banknote designs generated from the Bitcoin blockchain.

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109. In Disarming Corruptor, Matthew Plummer-Fernández presents a reversible algorithm for corrupting 3D CAD files. The artist's software twists 3D meshes into illegible configurations, helping users circumvent surveillance and other limitations on file-sharing.

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110. Biopresence (2005) by Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel, a collaboration with scientist Joe Davis, uses Davis's DNA Manifold algorithm to transcode human DNA into the DNA of a tree.

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111. The Talking Popcorn installation by Nina Katchadourian (2001) uses a Morse code decoder to interpret messages “spoken” by a popcorn machine.

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112. Each copy of Notepad (2007) by Matt Kenyon and Douglas Easterly resembles a standard yellow legal pad. The ruled lines on its pages, however, actually consist of microprinted text with the full names, dates, and locations of each Iraqi civilian death on record from the first three years of the Iraq War. One hundred copies of Notepad were covertly distributed to US senators and representatives, to help ensure that the names of Iraqi civilians would be memorialized in official US archives.

Additional Projects

Readings

  1. Florian Cramer, Hiding in Plain Sight: Amy Suo Wu's The Kandinsky Collective (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art, 2017), e-brochure.
  2. Manmohan Kaur, “Cryptography as a Pedagogical Tool,” Primus 18, no. 2 (2008): 198–206.
  3. Neal Koblitz, “Cryptography as a Teaching Tool,” Cryptologia 21, no. 4 (1997): 317–326.
  4. Susan Kuchera, “The Weavers and Their Information Webs: Steganography in the Textile Arts,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 13 (May 2018).
  5. Shannon Mattern, “Encrypted Repositories: Techniques of Secret Storage, From Desks to Databases,” Amodern 9 (April 2020).
  6. Jussi Parikka, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Steganographic Image,” unthinking.photography, February 2017.
  7. Charles Petzold, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Hoboken, NJ: Microsoft Press, 2000).
  8. Phillip Rogaway, “The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work” (paper presented at Asiacrypt 2015, Auckland, NZ, December 2015).
  9. Simon Singh, “Chamber Guide,” The Black Chamber (website), accessed April 12, 2020.
  10. Hito Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-) Recognition,” e-flux Journal 72 (2016).