Project #5 - Anti-Surveillance Tool

Objective

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

Submission

Reflection

My anti-surveillance tool explores secret rituals as a form of stenography. Certain divinitation tools are inhrently secret because their meanings and translations aren't always widely known.

The tribe that my family is from in Nigeria has a system of divination called Ifa, and one of the tools used is a divination chain made of 2 sets of 4 shells (8 total). Each shell has a distinct front and back. When the chain is tossed by a diviner, a combination of the eight objects facing upwards or downwards results in 256 possible readings, which represents a binary system. My sketch roughly translates this ritual into p5.js. On click of the canvas, the chain is "thrown" again.

During my brainstorming process, I also thought about underground railroad quilts that were said to be encoded with symbols to signal safety and communicate information about about how to escape, where certain icons represented certain logic. I also thought about the idea of 'lenticular logic' and forms of lenticular images from my childhood in the form of postcards and lenticular photographs that presented two different images when viewed from different directions. The viewer can see both images but it's nearly impossible to actually see both images at the same time.