#5 Anti-Surveillance Tool
Objective
Use the principles of steganography to encode a secret message that can be decoded through instructions.
Design Process
In Tactics and Poetics of Invisible Writing, Amy Suo Wu axplains that "collectively developed codes" serve to "strengthen community bonds while also excluding outsiders or shielding members from oppression" (Suo Wu, pg. 28). This is true of the 'lavendar linguistics' developed by LGBTQ communities around the word to communicate safely. For this project, I wanted to explore the history of queer languages and personals ads, designing specifically for a hometown quarantine experience where community happens online as the safest way to explore and build queer worlds.
Reflection
I thought it was interesting to be thinking about a secret code that's only accessible to certain people. At first, I was using the keyPressed(q) function to reveal a message to someone who knew the correct key, but I thought it would be interesting to reveal the message only if someone moves their mouse to the blue bar in the corner of the screen. I also added a way to break the message; if someone moves their mouse too far down the page, blendMode is activated and the message is obscured.