Bibliography 1

Annotated Bibliography

This post lists below some of the major references:

1. Youtube.com, Audie Murphy American Legend (2014) Admiral Jeremiah Denton Blinks Morse Code Warning as P.O.W.
   Available here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rufnWLVQcKg
   
   The video shows a footage recorded in 1966, which is an interview, supposedly a propaganda interview of the U.S navy marshal, Admiral Jeremiah Denton, during the war on Vietnam by the U.S, in this clip, he is shown in a televised propaganda interview which was broadcast in the United States. While answering questions and challenging the blinding television lights, he blinked his eyes in Morse Code spelling the word ‘torture’ and confirming the fact to the U.S Naval Intelligence that the American Prisoner Of Wars were tortured in Vietnam, which served as a concrete proof for the Intelligence regarding the conditions of the POWs.
   
2. Sang Mun (2012) ZXX Type
   Available here: https://zxx-font-website.webflow.io/
   
   It is a typeface designed by designer Sang Mun in 2012, that is unreadable by text scanning softwares (OCRs), and can misdirect information or is devoid of any information at times. It uses visual camouflage, distortion, added pixels as noise, optical patterns, extra alphabets to letterforms to create friction in reading, leading to communication that is unparsable to computers. However, the idea is that these are legible to the human eyes. The typeface’s forms are Camo (distorting letters using camouflage), Noise (additional pixels that creates noise) , Xed (fooling optical patterns overlayed on letterforms) and False (a smaller letterform is placed alongside a larger one). The project is a good provocation than an actual security measure on the topic of text based communication and privacy. It can also be used as a display typeface for creating awareness for circulation around this topic.
   
3. Heather Snyder Quinn (2020) Typographic Obfuscation: Communication for Privacy and Protest, Atypl.org
   Available here: https://atypi.org/presentation/typographic-obfuscation-communication-for-privacy-and-protest/
   
   “This talk presents stories of creative obfuscation for communication from the past, present, and future. Examples include speculative typography that utilizes augmented reality, biotechnology, machine learning, and techniques created by non-experts that engage multiple senses like voice and gesture. The non-expert demonstrates the breadth of human ingenuity for primal need and desire, often against much larger powers, and shows how subversive design and unsettling systems can be done by anyone. Throughout history, humans have always necessitated methods for hiding their secrets and maintaining their privacy. Their methods of concealment have evolved with time. Despite more advanced technologies and even the utmost diligence, no secret is ever totally safe; unless kept in the depths of one’s mind. However, a speculated future indicates that not even our thoughts are secure thanks to technology, via surveillance capitalism.”
   
   The speaker of this talk is a an assistant professor of design at DePaul University and her research on the topic of typographic obfuscation is extensive. She has also designed a publication around typographic obfuscation through type. This cites work from various practitioners working with speculative typography and obfuscation, which include work from other designers and students as well.
   
4. Janine Ungvarsky, EBSCO (2024) Pareidolia
   Available here: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/health-and-medicine/pareidolia
   
   “Pareidolia is the psychological term for the human tendency to attribute familiar patterns to random stimuli, such as seeing the “face” of the Man on the Moon, envisioning animal shapes in clouds, or hearing words in electronic static. The most common manifestation of pareidolia is the tendency to see faces in random patterns or groups of objects, such as the assorted bumps and scratches on a potato. Pareidolia is part of a larger psychological category of behaviors known as apophenia, or the tendency to try to create meaning out of unrelated events.”
   
   An important influence in my work. I have used pareidolia as a method of trickery to create friction in reading to understand the difference between reading in machines and humans. I wanted the letterforms to be such that humans would be able to form connections and find familiar letterforms in abstract images which would be misread by LLMs and AI. My investigation was to understand how humans and machines read visual text forms to find the ways reading could be different between the two.
   
5. Wikipedia, Turing Test
   Available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
   
   Turing test, also called the imitation game, developed by Alan Turing in 1949, was created to test a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour against that of a human. In this test, a human evaluator judges a text of a conversation between a human and a machine and identifies the machine and the machine passes if the human evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. Its interesting to note that this question was explored by Turing in 1950. Turing test is also directly related to the modern form of Captcha, which is also used online to differentiate humans from bots. In his paper he pondered upon the question of machine’s ability to think, in this case, a computer. Today with the advancements in technology and computation and the advent of Artificial Intelligence, the resemblance between humans and machines is becoming closer and closer. Over the past decade, many designers and practitioners have pondered over machine readability, privacy and surveillance.