User:Pedro Sá Couto/Black Transparency Experiments

An Exercise on Tactical Watermarking

What

Explain here
I started by working with the book: Black Transparency - The Right to Know in the Age of Mass by Metahaven.

Why this book: I was looking for this book from the beginning of my research. I came across with the first ten pages of it in aaaaaarg.fail. The rest was not available anywhere. I wanted to buy it but it was not available in the publisher, and the ones selling in eBay were going for 70+ euros. I found it on a sketchy website for 20 euros and naively I bought it. Long story short I was scammed. The book never existed, it was never shipped and I never got any news from it. Maybe it is still on its way (as I actually believe in this.)

I searched the online catalogue of hogeschool and it was not properly indexed. Apparently, it existed a copy is the Piet Zwart Building.

I scanned it. All the 320 pages in one go. And it never came through by email. It was starting to get personal.

I scanned it again. This time 20 pages at a time and I finally had it digitized.

In these scans, we can see traces relating the book to the research station. And it was linked to me because I had checked it out with my personal card.

Method

With this exercise, I use six strategies to tactical watermarking : "As a means to expression", "To create personal relations and communities", "As a signature", "To obsure any present imprint or Watermark", "To create memory of the medium", "As a sensorial Augmentation".
These different strategies will be explained thoroughly in my thesis (Chapter 2, Point B), click here to read the outline!

I created a script that gives me a random page to work with and a random approach to watermarks within these 6 tactics.

from random import randrange
import random

pagenr = (randrange(325))
tactic_list = ["As a means to expression",
"To create personal relations and communities",
"As a signature",
"To obscure any present imprint or Watermark",
"To create memory of the medium",
"As a sensorial Augmentation"]

tactic = random.choice(tactic_list)
print("\n" + "Create a watermark — ", tactic)

print("Apply to page NR — " + str(pagenr) + "\n")

A few results

01

Create a watermark —  As a means to expression
Apply to page NR — 90

02

Create a watermark —  To obscure any present imprint or Watermark
Apply to page NR — 1

03

Create a watermark —  To obscure any present imprint or Watermark
Apply to page NR — 325