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 Process

I started this process by thinking about morse code and other coded ways of writing, trying to think of a way to incorporate for loops into the drawing process of each letter. I then realized that not only was this a bit complicated, but it also didn’t have an intended audience or intended author. So, I went back to the drawing board on it. At the end of the day, I needed the code to translate 1 to 1 to english, since I can only speak english and wanted to avoid translation issues between languages. So, I had the option of using any english-origin slang or ‘cant’. I immediately gravitated towards Polari. Polari is a mostly dead slang language that arrose in 1950s/60s england to allow gay men to talk to eachother without being found out. Polari words have origins in romance languages and earlier english slang, but translate 1 to 1 to modern english thanks to their recent time frame. However, I couldn’t find any extensive dictionaries or records of Polari words online. So, I moved on and looked for other english cants, and came across Dungeons and Dragons thieves cant. Thieves cant in D&D is a series of coded words for various thieving-related topics, but it isn’t very extensive. My research on thieves cant led me to Vulgar Tongue, which is the real historic version of thieves cant. Vulgar Tongue dictionaries date back to the 1700s, and were usually written for law enforcement. Vulgar Tongue is the national or vernacular language of a nation, in contrast to ‘higher’ languages such as latin. English Vulgar Tongue is very colorful, and I had a lot of fun reading through various dictionaries of it. To use it in my code, I created two text options- one in Vulgar Tongue, one in english- and a text box with an enter button. If the reader knows Vulgar Tongue, they can answer the prompt correctly in the text box, which will translate the message text to plain modern english. I then realized that unfortunately my sketch didn’t use for loops, so I decided to use a nested for loop of ellipses to make a creepy eye pattern in the background. If I had more time to work on this project I would get the pupils of the eyes to track to the direction of the mouse, making it look like they are watching you. I would also add a ‘reset’ button that would reload the sketch after you have completed the prompt, so you don’t have to reload the page. I could also create multiple random Vulgar Tongue prompts to answer. If I had way too much time on my hands, I would sort the dictionary of Vulgar tongue words by modern english category (ie, words for law men, words for thieves, money, amounts, etc).