Digital things that are unique? How that? I try.
| First of all: I love the new digital freedom. For a DJ who
prepares a set itīs a must today to have a huge lot of music somewhere. As a
filmmaker those millions of movies in the web are a gift to me - 99 percent of
them are not for sale, not for rent at all. They would have been lost without
offers to share in the internet. Digitalisation in partnership with the internet gives the greatest technical explosion to culture since letterpress, and I wanna live with it and fight within it. O.K.? Anyway I have two ideas how to make the data of a digital picture unique, a defensive and an aggressive idea.. The program "pretty good privacy" was the one inspiration to me. My original data content a message about place, date, and the customer who buyed them. If someone chances the data, the message gets lost and the copy clearly is a stolen thing. If you copy the original data and they spread, you can be recognized as the owner. To read the message you need the artist. The message is not to be seen on the data. The artist has a constant encoding algorithmus and his special software. If you tell him place, date and name, then the artist can open the message. To make shure that you can find your message even if the artist is not present, it is stored on a notary. Not simple, hm? But peaceful. The other idea is harmful. |
This machine played itīs data, but did not allow a dialogue with a computer. |
| Once I found an I-Pod in a garbage can. Of course I took
it. Of course I gave some external power to it. And wonder what? It played
music, wow, it was not damaged, dates were not deleted. But when, as a
next step, I connected the I-pod to my computer, my anti-virus-software gave the
loudest alarm I ever heard. This I-Pod was so infected from the bottom to the
top, that I should have to destroy the data... and maybe even then... I
formatted the whole thing, gave itīs data to hell, and it has a virus-free new
life today. What does that mean? Actually I sell data of pictures to you on a signed USB stick. Stick it in a digital frame, stick it in an USB player: Machines that have a hardware based mechanism to read the data will give you the show. I expect most of such machines will be unable to copy. Donīt stick the signed Chris Mennel USB stick into a computer: It is a box of worms and virusses. |