The potentials of technological flaws

Rosa Menkman, Discrete Cosine Transform, 2015. The performative lecture.

The legibility of an encrypted message does not just depend on the complexity of the encryption algorithm, but also on the placement of the data of the message. The Discreet Cosine Transform is a mathematical technique. In the case of the JPEG compression, a DCT is used to describe a finite set of patterns, called macroblocks, that could be described as the 64 characters making up the JPEG image, adding lumo and chroma values as ‘intonation’. Menkman will navigate a world made of of JPEG DCTs. The encrypted message, hidden on the surface of the image is only legible by the ones in the know.