User:Pedro Sá Couto/Graduate Research Seminar Trim 5/Chapter 03 23012020
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Part 03
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PART 3: Deploying Tactical Watermarks
- Point A: Watermarks operate different roles
- 1 — Displaying provenance of a medium
- 2 — Signatures
- 3 — Watermarks to obscure
- 4 — As a means to expression
- 5 — Creating relations and communities
- 6 — Sensorial Augmentation
- Research focus
- I will explore what strategies can be reappropriated from watermarks to add provenance to different media. How can we reuse them? What opportunities arise? What modes of address can be formed?
- Summary
- During this chapter I will delve into different strategies on how the process of adding stains can be twisted and revived. I aim to compare how topics introduced in Part 1 and 2 of the thesis have influenced my creative process and what responses were motivated by them in my research and project development.
This will happen while commenting about watermarks' power to infiltrate, either against social structure, as a way to create relations and communities, augmenting the sense of solidarity, as user signatures, as a way to obscure previous watermarks, for sensorial augmentation and marks of quality. I will explore and compare it to what other projects or approaches I have encountered and reflect over their influence in my project. Tactical watermarks is not only a system but I will also delve into how it can be deployed.
WATERMARKS OPERATE DIFFERENT ROLES
Introduction to my creative response
With Tactical Watermarks, I describe ways of living within and displaying resistance against a culture of surveillance in publishing. It is relevant to understand and explore what it is living in a culture of increasingly constant tracking, rather than aiming to solve the many problems of surveillance. During my use of watermarks and more specifically, with my creative response, the main objective was to create a positive discourse around the act of watermarking. This discourse is then changed while using them to create a top layer of information, able to embed traces of provenance in different texts. By provenance, I intend to express all the traces not used to surveil users but the ones able to trace historical importance to files and that facilitate precise documentation within an archive or library. Tactical watermarks is not only a system but I will also delve into how it can be deployed, comparing it to what other projects or approaches I have encountered and reflect over their influence in my project.
While challenging centralised distribution channels, I ventured on how the process of adding stains can be twisted and revived. Stains are what I will call user patches or marks that are difficult to remove and that do not play an active role in archives. While exploring the process of adding imprints, different discourses were arising from this: as a way to obscure previous ones, of commenting on the situation and encouraging behaviours, to create relations and communities, augmenting the sense of solidarity in archives, for digital enhancements, marks of quality, etc.
I aim to link my creative response on the case of digital watermarking to what has been happening in parallel within different cultures, from graffiti culture to "crack intros". Crack intros appeared for the first time in the '80s; they were not commissioned for a commercial purpose. Instead, these were introduced by a programmer or a group of coders, graphic artists, and musicians that were responsible for removing the software's copy protection and that made this crack public (Green, 1995). Watermarks may form a discourse around topics such as anonymity, borders, archives, and provenance; while rethinking watermarks, exploring their hidden layers and aspects of surprise, visibility or invisibility, on different forms of communicating. I find it essential to acknowledge that watermarks have the power to infiltrate and perform different roles and to create a parallel stream of information within various texts. When it comes to publishing, how can watermarks create a critical discourse around the right to access knowledge and represent the ones that fight for it?
1 — Displaying provenance of a medium
It is crucial to consolidate how the term provenance will be used. By provenance, I aim to unify all processes that provide clues and evidence from the moment of the origin of a file documenting its life span — providing information on what might be the source of a text, such as, its place of origin. Until the history of its ownership and even the motivation to why an individual made it public. Unifying all this voices part of a stream of empathy, decisions, hidden tasks and actions.
The same way I have delved into the first chapter, the flow of texts, downloads and users are always constrained by the politics of platforms that grant access. It is essential to acknowledge that these platforms more often than not share documents and versions of the same file in between them. With Tactical Watermarks, I aim to create also documentation to make this process visible. With watermarks and without compromising on the users' identities, I aim to set ground to what I find noteworthy. Such as finding ways to translate the flow of users and texts, within this complex mesh architectured in a rhizomatic structure.
I feel essential to merge the hidden processes behind the upload of a new file within itself, documenting this stream of options. This is achieved by documenting the invisible natural connections formed by platforms' uses, adding memory to a collection, while materialising the hidden tasks of digitising a book, processes and motivations behind its selection and all the actions along this process.
2 — Signatures
In Tactical Watermarking, I also purpose that digital watermarking may be used as a signature, just as we can spot in graffiti culture or crack intros.
Just as distributing copyrighted material and cracking software, graffiti is a controversial subject. It has a rich background dating back to several cultures like the Egyptians, Greek or Romans, where writing or drawing in walls or other surfaces was common to be found. Graffiti nowadays is seen as a form of artistic expression without permission. Just as in crack intros where we can discover pseudonyms to protect identities and thwart prosecution, in graffiti, a subculture to challenge authority, the same thing happens.
In Crack intros, such signatures referred to as “crack screens” were customarily included in-game title screens displaying the game name, the logo of the producer, and a graphic that provided the player with a glimpse of the game theme. The signatures were initially simple statements, such as “cracked by ...,” sometimes intentionally misspelt as “kracked by ...” (Reunanen et al., 2015). The main difference I aim to emphasise between graffiti and crack intros is the is text screen is in many ways similar to graffiti, although the so-called crack-intros invaded the private sphere and not the public space. (Cubitt and Thomas, 2009)
An essential link to all these formats of signatures is found in ancient ways of watermarking. Craftsmen would explore pseudonyms, in this case, in the form of imagery built in the paper frames. This opens a path of exploring digital watermarking to almost an arrogant way of identifying us as liable of the process and decisions without carrying any liability whatsoever. Tactics as using pseudonyms will be reappropriated to challenge authority and to challenge digital identity and accountability.
3 — Watermarks to obscure
Tactical Watermarking is not only a system about revealing hidden layers and augmenting the memory of an archive. It is also about creating strategies to suppress unwanted information. It is valuable to stress that in the contemporary panorama of digital watermarking, calling out user identity is the ultimate goal. While recognising the intention to remove this layer of information, I felt like it was relevant to create parallelism to the project SecureDrop. This project was first released under the name DeadDrop, designed and developed by Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen. SecureDrop is a free software platform that enables safe communication between whistleblowers, journalist and different organisations. In this platform, whistleblowers, which are the sources, submit documents and data while avoiding most common forms of online tracking (Ball, 2014). During this process, sources are also assigned a random user name, allowing a journalist to contact and privately chat with them.
The connections I intend to make between my system and SecureDrop are that both main intentions are the creation of strategies to anonymously disseminate files not intended to be part of the public sphere. Establishing parallelisms between how either private or public organisations protect secrets and how publishers protect copyright material. In their core, the critical aspect to them is how they facilitate the anonymisation of files. In SecureDrop by using private, isolated servers, and using encryption and decryption tools. In Tactical Watermarking using watermarks as a way to obscure already existing one, by overlaying existing marks found, and by re-writing new subjective metadata to documents, obscuring user traces aimed at making them accountable as explored in the previous chapter of my thesis.
4 — As a means to expression
Within this framework, and throughout the act of watermarking, I aim to create a space to publish undercovered personal, political and other kinds of messages. With my creative response, I consider that users commenting and publishing their thoughts disseminated hand to hand with the actual circulation of a file is relevant. Having the power of saying that I am here, and I disagree with how paywalls, borders, and how rules are structured and reinforced is compelling and pertinent. These messages must be published and made public.
This being, we can compare these ideas commenting as a strategy of contemporary political resistance to what has been happening in cracked of software, such as Adobe Zii. Adobe Zii or Adobe Zii Patcher is a one-click software program patcher or activation tool for Mac. The developers of this software inserted the quote "why join the navy if you can be a pirate" during the actual process of patching the desired software. It is striking how this intention differs from the one in Crack Intros, creating a reference, not to the one who released this patch but creating a relation to the actual act of copying, commenting on a situation and encouraging provocative behaviours.
I believe that using watermarks as a way of commenting on power structures, dissemination of knowledge and other equivalent situations and opinions will also function as a political mirror to what as been happening to free access to knowledge and information. While achieving this through digital watermarking, we are not only able to reach the ones that are already fighting within this culture, but also the ones that might be uninformed users of shadow libraries and other grey publishing platforms, creating a political discourse around such topics.
5 — Creating relations and communities
During the first chapter, I have explored how different media are used to publish ideas through alternative forms of publishing. This used to happen through zines, the underground press or other types of publishing as the Samizdat. Currently, parallel streams of publishing exist mainly in the form of online platforms, opened to publish all sorts of copyrighted and forbidden materials. Within the context of Tactical Watermarking seems relevant to delve further into strategies that facilitate communication, especially the use of steganography.
Even though several forms of communication responsible for avoiding conventional methods of surveillance are achieved mainly by writing an encoded message and by the use of a decoding system when it reaches its target, with steganography, this happens differently. The message is hidden in plain sight as the main strategy. Steganography allows two parties to broadcast a message deceived or disguised within other data. Watermarks and steganography both happen in digital and analogue formats. While both terms can be applied to the transmission of information hidden or embedded in other data, they are often wrongly merged and is vital to clarify them. Steganography relates to undercovered point-to-point communication between two parties. (Katzenbeisser and Petitcolas, 2000) Watermarking has the extra demand of robustness towards potential attacks (Katzenbeisser, 1999).
Steganography is an important subdiscipline of information hiding. In the book, A Cookbook of Invisible Writing from Amy Suo Wu, alternative forms of communication are published in the format of recipes documenting techniques reused from spies to prisoners, but not only old tactics of steganography exist. In China, researchers understood that while digital communications and data security are becoming more sophisticated, there is still the need to develop ways to send hard copy messages securely. These have developed a printing technology only be read with a UV light over the printed medium (Davis, 2019).
All this set of parallel techniques of communication led me to explore which strategies can we reappropriate using watermarks as a way of annotation. How can we open space to communication between users of a system while maintaining their anonymity? One might have felt the thrill when a downloaded file from Lib gen or similar library still contains traces of previous users. It is quite amusing this relation established with someone we are not related with. You feel part of a movement, as you had a glimpse of a moment, captured in time.
With Tactical watermarks, I want to open spaces to dialogue, to publish displays of interest, as well as, demonstrations of solidarity. This can be done, just as writing a message in a paper, drop it in a public space and wait for someone to find it. In a big picture, I do not plan to make this something you may find by chance; I aim to explore what are the possibilities of making someone thrilled to see these messages as a compulsory or a regular habit.
6 — Sensorial Augmentation
At last, I propose that digital watermarks still have space to produce sensorial enhancements. Enacted through watermarking and with a background in the practice of graphic design, I reckon that we might be able to establish different rhythms and hierarchies within a narrative. Just as introduced earlier in this text, watermarks might have had their origin concerning manufacturing processes, but they might have been an artistic method of expression by papermakers aswell. With Tactical Watermarking, digital watermarks may substitute digitally the impact that graphic design has in the process of creating books as a physical media, where they can be recognised as an object by themselves. In graphic design, choices such as the paper, the binding, or even how different chapters are separated become part of an endeavour to heighten the narrative. Interestingly, mixed attitudes can exist towards this process. Either by trying to respect the text, without overpowering it, but also, as a way of exploring it as a medium where restructuring may form new ways of reading and understanding. Two constants are then present, the exploration of repetition and absence of it, and the experimentation regarding text flows.
The main drive during my research was to explore how can analogue techniques be appropriate and transported into digital watermarking. I find particularly amusing unconventional strategies, such as the use of scented paper in print. Such methods allow us to rethink the flow of information and takes part in shaping the perception we have from texts. Through this scented technology, we explore the vision and the scent at the same time, transporting us to different realities, creating a stimulus that we don't usually experience while reading. In digital files, I compare this to the feeling of encountering graphic elements that exist outside the main narrative. While most digital files lack personality, with new visual elements appended, I aim to incite new sensation while building new experiences through paratextual components.