User:Pedro Sá Couto/Black Transparency Experiments

An Exercise on Tactical Watermarking

What

While rethinking watermarks, exploring their hidden layers and aspect of surprise, visibility or invisibility, on different forms of communicating different paths started to open.
I find important to acknowledge that watermarks have the power to infiltrate and perform different roles.
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".

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 obsure 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