Thursday, October 31, 2002

Hidden and not so Hidden Messages Steganography simply takes one piece of information and hides it within another. StegoArchive.com For example, yesterday's picture of Jack Valenti conveys infomation as a picture, plus a hidden message. Unlike, Jack Valenti's picture, where the small symbols that make it up can be seen and may prompt the question of a hidden message, Steganography's true value is when the message is so hidden that it cannot be detected and only the sender and intended receiver know the message. For a piece of art to include a coded message component, there must be some way for the intended reciever to understand there is a message and be able to get to it. For art to allude to the message so that it a general audience can at least understand there may be a message, it needs to be relatively overt, or the artist's intent known through other means (in some form of an artist statement.) To be clear I am not talking about allegorical of Jungian symbology, but of cyphers, text, machine readable code. 2:11:36 PM