Critical Computation
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Anti-Surveillance Tool

Objective

Use the principles of steganography to encode a secret message that can be decoded through instructions.

Description

Steganography is the practice of hiding information under plainsight. Techniques such as the invisible ink, microdot, knitted message, or the anaglyph are just a few examples of how one might bypass information under disguise.

Illusion as tactics is an ancient and culturally diverse practice, and they tend to fully flourish under the eras of authoritarianism and other forms of surveillance and oppression. We would encourage you to look back into your own cultural history, find a way to use Loops to create optical illusions that pass a secret message through the intentional creation of perceptual confusions. Your secret message can be textual or visual. In addition to the examples provided in this week’s lecture and tutorials, Nazia Fakhruddin has also written a handful of interesting ways to create visual illusions in p5.js on Medium.

Please be very intentional about the message you’re choosing to hide and the concealing technique you’re employing in this assignment. The context you choose to situate your tool will largely impact the effectiveness of your project.

Design Constraint

Canvas Size: 600 x 600

Part 1 : Due 10/1

  1. Context Matters: Over the course of several weeks we have covered the way in which technology is often presented as “neutral” and solely “utilitarian.” Moving away from this assumption, identify three ways in which a specific cultural or social history that has importance to you might serve as the starting point for this assignment.
  2. Sender and Receiver: Know your audience. Who are you communicating to and why? Identify three possible recipients of the information you are concealing. These can be recipients in real-life, fictional characters, or even historical figures, but the choice should be motivated by the context you establish in step one.
  3. The Medium is the Message: What will you communicate to your intended recipient? What possible visual strategies will support this message?
  4. Sketch out your ideas.
  5. Be prepared to share your ideas, and the impact your experience, or history and culture has on the work you are proposing CC Lab on 10/1 for feedback. Be ready to discuss any questions you may have about the next part of the assignment.

Part 2: Due 10/6

  1. Choose a specific idea to develop further. (A complete idea will have a social or historical context that is meaningful to you, a message for an intended recipient, and a visual strategy you will attempt to execute.)
  2. Begin working on your sketch. You are free to incorporate programmatic elements introduced in past weeks. As well, you should incorporate looping and nested looping into your assignment.
  3. Be sure to include the following information on your CC Portfolio Assignment #5 page:
    • Your p5 sketch (embedded iframe)
    • Your name
    • A description of your project idea including context, recipient, and visual strategy you have employed.
    • Your assignment reflections
  4. Reflect upon the following:
    • How identity and/or interests influence the basic choices about what to design and who to design for.
    • Your choice of visual strategy and how well it worked to accomplish your goals

Submission Guidelines

Please submit your sketch to two places:

  1. Submit the sketch to the CC Lab class Canvas Assignment 5
  2. Add the sketch to your Critical Computation portfolio

Tutorials