Project #5 Anti-Surveillance Tool

Description

People can create their secret message and this one will be hidden in the microdots. The receiver will hover the mouse from left to right, from top to bottom over the dots to unveil the secret message that will appear in the console.

Background Story

The history of my Grandma’s family is very interesting. In 1912, her grandfather was killed with the president of that time by conservative and religious groups because they were the precursors of the Liberal Revolution in Ecuador. This didn’t stop her family from being actively involved in politics, as part of the liberal party. Years passed and in 1942, Ecuador and Peru were at war over the amazon border, and with the threat of losing Guayaquil, my hometown and the main port of the country, President Carlos Arroyo del Rio sent to Brazil a committee conformed by Julio Tobar Donoso and Alfredo Solf y Muro to sign the Protocol of Rio de Janeiro that gave to Peru a big part of our Amazon territory. Once again the masses wanted to take actions against the government, and there were riots in the Capital and in Guayaquil. People were breaking into the houses of those that were part of the government to do justice by their own hands. At that time my grandmother was a teenager. Her, her sisters, and her father helped two families to hide, one family hid in their house and the other one at the neighbor’s house. They created fake walls with mattresses to protect themselves from the bullets that were shooting at one of the family’s home. One family hid in my grandma’s attic, the other family was able to cross to the neighbor’s house from my grandma’s roof. My grandmother’s house was always a place where people gather and discuss politics, social issues, and so many different topics that she encouraged us to know and discuss. Inspired by my grandmother’s story and this particular house, I created my project. I put myself at that time and thought about how these families could communicate from house to house without being detected. Also, I thought what if the code gets into the wrong hands?

I created a microdot code that hides a secret message that tells the receiver to meet in Guayaquil at my grandma’s home on independence day, at 5:pm. This message is intended for family and close friends only. Thinking that someone else can understand the code, the hidden message is written in a certain way so nobody out of the close circle will know where is grandma’s house, and who is grandma.

I explored two other ideas before creating the microdot

First idea: A square full of letters and an overlay will expose with a different color the secret message

Second idea: a combination of shapes and colors that represent a letter of the alphabet, and based on the combinations of the shapes we get a word.

Third idea: A microdot is a text or an image substantially reduced in size to prevent detection by unintended recipients. Microdots are normally circular and around one millimeter in diameter but can be made into different shapes and sizes

Design Process

To unveil the hidden message the receiver has to hover the mouse from left to right and from top to bottom. The secret message will appear in the console. I created a sketch and thought about how to structure my code. I started creating the array which became the string that contains the characters that show the secret message. To create the pattern I used class, I decided to use class because I can add a specific action to each pattern. Using conditional if, on mouseX and mouseY, I created the hover that will show the secret message in the console.log. That also helped me to determine what characters of the array will go to the dots and what to the squares. On function Setup, I created the hidden message and distribute it through the canvas using for loop, and modulo to define the width of the canvas, and set the next line of squares and dots, and division for the Y-axis. In function Draw, I distributed the string of the array through the length of my draw.

Reflection

I enjoyed the process of this project, from the research and conceptual part, where I talked to my grandmother and got more details of the family stories to create the code for the microdot. My challenges were to figure out how I was going to add each character of my string to the squares and dots. I knew that I have to use a conditional, but not in the squares and dots, but in the X and Y axis, as well as using mouseX and mouseY. I also realized that I need to give a size to the hover because the axis has a size, and when I hover it wasn’t connecting with the dots, so I increased the size of the axis to ten, even though the dots still size 1, that way the secret message unveils easily.

Another challenge was creating the pattern, I use a for loop but the lines of the pattern weren’t straight, so I use floor which is a mathematical method that calculates the closest or equal value of the first parameter.