On Dirty Numbers

I was intrigued by the premise of Epic Romance’s project, Dirty Numbers. We were instructed to share something dirty, and then obfuscate it in binary code – so as to make whatever message we left invisible to human eyes, without actually destroying the content – a pseudo-encryption that had some interesting implications in the context of the class regarding strong / weak ties, networks, etc. It also brings to the foreground something that happens to every bit (literally) of our digital correspondence – broken down into a stream of on and off switches that are entirely useless as a means of communication without reassembly.

The way in which it broke down becomes a kind of meta-commentary on human --> computer --> human ineraction. The fact that we moved from something human readable (text) to computer readable (binary) and then intervened (flipped zeros/ones) to make the text readable to neither humans nor computers. Something so simple as the number swap would be enough to destroy any digital communication - these abstractions that we have come to rely on, and largely ignore, are all a bit precarious.

Do you have any further plans for the binary code you ended up with? You mentioned that the site would soon be afire, do we still have that to look forward to? Was anyone's communication destroyed entirely through some error in the text --> binary or find/replace number flipping operation (and did you expect / intend for that sort of mistake to happen)?