Project Demo
Isaac Quinn DuPont
Faculty of Information
University of Toronto
Biography
Isaac Quinn DuPont is a PhD student in the Faculty of Information, at the University of Toronto. He studies a broad range of “coding technologies,” and has recently been exploring cross–disciplinary approaches to cryptography for his dissertation.
Abstract
Twenty years after the publication of Agrippa (a book of the dead), the included electronic poem has been cracked. The poem was written by science–fiction author William Gibson. When loaded on a Mac Plus computer, the poem scrolls down the screen once, and then displays the garbled remnants of encryption—never to run again. Alan Liu and Mathew Kirschenbaum argue that the encryption of the poem reveals the “grace of the mechanism” which is a “still dilating performance” of encoded being. For Liu and Kirschenbaum, however, the performance terminates with the encryption, since the program famously runs only a single time—in their words, there is “no round trip.”
In the summer of 2012 I launched a cracking contest to prove that there is indeed a round trip. Conceptually, ciphertext is always a potential performance, since there is always a threat of cryptanalysis (“cracking”). The guided demo will give viewers a chance to run the original poem in emulation, inspect the results, and then round–trip the ciphertext through a variety of cryptanalysis tools. The demo will include information about the various tricks and ruses that were originally programmed into the electronic poem. When the guided interaction is not in use a video recording of the round–trip will play in an endless performance, reinforcing the “infinite semiosis” of encryption. This project offers insight into new methods for digital humanities, and helps expand the conceptual possibilities of researching encryption—a technology that is now overwhelmingly common.