User:Laurier Rochon/notes/what

Project #1

The Listener was a project that had 2 basic parts : a simple chatting program and a plotter. As participants (2 or more) used the chatting program to engage in conversation, their talk would be mediated by a piece of software. This intermediate caught the text and changed it before it appeared on the others' screen. Important to note is the fact that if participant A sent a string of text to participant B, which got mediated by "The Listener" while transiting through the software, participant A saw the original text he/she typed, and participant B saw the modified version. In essence, this third agent was to be completely transparent in the process.

As a conversation progressed, it would typically become convoluted and prone to misunderstandings, as each participant responded to text that was not really sent to them. To provide insight and give closure to the people using the system, a large plotter would print in real-time the transcript of the conversation on a large roll of paper - both altered and unaltered versions.

Project #2

Tragic 9 was a daily newsletter anyone could subscribe to. In the early hours of every morning, a computer robot would scour the vast plains of our digital landscape and gather all the tragic news it could find. It then compressed it into 9 lines of text and turned into a soap opera that would be delivered to your email inbox a few hours later - just in time for morning coffee. The different episodes followed their predecessor's storyline and offered a quick glimpse of what had happened in the world. The three distincs characters of the soap opera had their own recognizable personality traits, and the setting would always be in accordance with popular soap opera style. I planned to have different "seasons" of this textual theater play, but was never able to actually implement this.

Project #3

The Kim Jong-Il cipher was a cryptographic algorithm used to encode and decode messages sent electronically. By encrypting one's messages with this cipher, a string of unreadable text - shaped in the form of Kim John-Il's infamous sunglasses (using ASCII art techniques) - was returned to the user. It could then be easily pasted and reused without fear of arising suspicion. This blatantly sarcastic, yet functional system was a direct commentary on the state of certain countries' attitude towards the expansion of communication technologies, notably North Korea. In time, I have also added a "Kadhafi 256-bit cipher" as well as a "128-bit Mugabe cipher" to reflect how these diactator's policies have affected their respective countries' situation in regards to free speech and the technologies that enable it.

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how (The Kim Jong-Il cipher)

The fist part of the how was research. I needed to look up a lot of different resources that referenced dictators that ran their country with strict policies in terms of internet access. The most evident one was John-Il's North Korean policy of 'intranet', but this practice of cutting out access to your citizens seemed to be more widespread than I thought in other parts of the world. Part II was building the actual cipher, which meant devising a system of encrypting and decrypting textual information, and creating it using programming code.

why (The Kim Jong-Il cipher)

I have strong feelings about the political implications of Internet technology, and I felt like I could get my point across with a piece that was instantly recognizable (to anyone who follows the news, anyways). Also, I believe that access to these kinds of resources are taken by granted by people of the west, but in many countries such access is nearly impossible to come by.