Wednesday, October 30, 2002

A Picture Worth a Thousand Words Here's what looks to be a rather nice portait of a gentleman. ...Sorry the thumbnail is a bit rough... He's smiling, has a natural turn of his head, looks like he's got a suit on..one could go on with a formal photographic art critique, discussing compostion, values, etc...in order to better understand the work and its meaning. Typically, another way to understand the work would be to deconstruct the photograph. This could be done in a number of ways. We'll go along this route by saying he is Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association. He is also very much opposed to people being able to copy movies: "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston [S]trangler is to the woman home alone." EFF (secondary source) We now have a formal appreciation and a more 'historical' one of what this picture means. One last tid bit of information, this picture is actually composed of machine readable code that "translates' into an algorithm that among other things can by pass copying protection schemes on DVDs. (You can view the orginal here) Because of this, it may be illegal. Art with an important and unique type of informational component... Picture and Legal Issues courtesy of Touretzky, D. S. (2000) Gallery of CSS Descramblers. Available: , (10/29/2002). 10:42:27 PM