"Beyond the Binary" : An Anti-Surveillance Tool
Description
“Beyond the Binary” is a confusing sketch covered in randomly changing 0’s and 1’s that prints out an error message. If the user presses their mouse, a tool to decode the secret message will appear. The decoding tool works by using anaglyphic color channels. The message is also made out of 0’s and 1’s, so that if one doesn’t know what to look for, it’d be difficult to find the message. Using the tool activated by clicking the mouse, the sketch will reveal an ASCII art heart.
Click here for the link to the p5 editor and sketch.
Design Process
Inspired by lavender linguistics as mentioned in Amy Suo Wu’s Tactics and Poetics of Invisible Writing, I wanted to create an anti-survelliance tool for queer people, who despite being more and more accepted, their identity is still criminalized in many countries and denied or persecuted by various communities. I also wanted to create a tool motivated by non-commercialized queerness, as I feel that queer identities have increasingly been turned into a gimmick for entertainment and marketing purposes. I wanted to convey a grounded message of what queerness is truly about: love, and not confining peoples’ identities based on societal standards or anything else, which is why my anti-surveillance tool is called “Beyond the Binary”. The idea of the binary is also why I wanted to use 0’s and 1’s. Overall, I wanted this to be a code that queer people could use to communicate love and acceptance with one another without judgement from unwanted eyes.
Another inspiration for this sketch was ASCII art, since it uses keyboard symbols to create images, and if one were to look at the symbolism alone, it wouldn’t make any sense. I thought that could be a good way of conveying a secret, coded message. In addition, I thought that perhaps one of the best ways to prevent unwanted viewers to decode your message is by making it seem like it’s not a message at all. One of the fastest ways to get people to look away from the message is if it is confusing, unpleasant to the eye, and even looks broken. That is why I made the sketch hiding the message an unpleasant screen full of flashing 0’s and 1’s and included an error message that says, “Error: Please contact systems manager” in order to get people who don’t realize there’s a hidden message to believe that what they’re looking at is broken. Even if an unintended user clicks the sketch to activate the decoding tool, because the message is ASCII art they’re likely just to see binary code wherever they move their cursor. The 0’s and 1’s may cause one to believe that the code is in binary as well, causing them to misinterpret the message and look for the wrong thing, which will hopefully help thwart people from retrieving the secret message.
Reflection
Since my anti-surveillence tool is meant for queer people, I based a lot of the design choices on my background and experiences with the queer community. Having met most of my queer friends during Out 4 Undergrad, a conference for young LGBT+ people exploring careers in the tech industry, my sketch was inspired by computer programming. I also know a lot of discourse in the queer community is about not thinking of people in binaries, which is why I was influenced by binary code.
Although somewhat unintentional, I realized that this tool is really designed for the queer community that I’m a part of, not the queer community as a whole. Most of my queer friends are in tech fields, specifically computer science, and the children of immigrants, often with conservative parents. Therefore, within the community I’m a part of there is an abundance of young queer people with a background in coding and who find it difficult to come out to their parents. Without intending to, I created a tool designed for the subcommunity that I’m a part of. The members of this subcommunity not only have the need for such a tool to get messages across to other members of the community, but they would also have the ability to recognize that this p5 sketch is not actually a code and would take a closer look at it. The primary visual strategy I largely relied on was one which distracted and confused, which I believe would work on most people outside of the community the tool is meant for. Meanwhile, the ASCII art hides in plain sight and can only be recognized if one both uses the tool and looks at the image as a whole rather than focusing on the numbers that make up the message.