The history of 20th century painting conven-

tionally identifies abstraction with modernism

and the return of figuration with postmoder-

nism. But abstraction ended much earlier, in

a spy operation during World War II, when a

British intelligence officer, in a stroke of ge-

nius, found abstract paintings to be the perfect

carriers for secret messages transported across

the ocean. For this purpose, he commissioned

a painting to Wassily Kandinsky that included

a secret message encoded - in the manner of

flag signs or Morse code - into its seemingly

abstract visual shapes. Tis anecdote explains

steganography: the clever hiding of messages

in other messages. Steganographic messages do

not need to appear innocuous. At some point,

militant jihadists were reported to run porno-

graphic websites as a cover, using porn images

for hidden communication. Unlike cryptogra-

phic messages, which typically are scrambled,

unreadable and therefore visible as encoded

message at first sight, steganographic messages

are designed to slip under the radar. Amy Suo

Wu’s steganographic works do this as well,

using Cardan Grille (the superimposition of

grids on texts to uncover hidden text), substi-

tution ciphers and camouflaged text within text

in combination with invisible inks.

Kandinsky accepted the job for the British in-

telligence service, and his painting was shipped

across the ocean. If we believe official history,

this remained a one-time experiment. But how

would modern art history need to be rewritten,

and abstract painting to be reinterpreted, if the

practice really continued? (Tis may be a less

paranoid thought than it first sounds, given the

historical fact of the CIA having been a major

force in promoting post-war American abstract

expressionist painting).

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Anecdote is, according to the Oxford English

Dictionary, a “short, amusing or interesting story

about a real incident”. Edgar Allan Poe’s short

story “Te Purloined Letter” (1844) can be

read as an anecdote in this sense, since over the

course of time its status changed from a piece of

fiction to an often-quoted, quasi-real life para-

ble. In the story, amateur detective C. Auguste

Dupin recovers a blackmail letter that police

investigators had failed to find simply because

they had searched a room looking for something

hidden while he found it hanging there in plain

sight. “Te Purloined Letter” is thus the extreme

example of steganography as a message that is

not what and where it seems to be. So it is the

seeming paradox of Amy Suo Wu’s invisible

ink works, and of steganography in general, that

they show things in plain sight while hiding

them at the same time. Professional stegano-

graphers call that which is publicly visible the

“plaintext” or “payload” (which can be a painting,

a piece of writing, an audio recording or any

other medium) and the message hidden in it,

the “cyphertext”, “covert message” or “package”.

Is analog steganography merely a legacy or

nostalgic form of information obfuscation

today? Especially when using the classical

technique of invisible inks, in a digital commu-

nication age where few letters are still written

by hand on paper?

Not even secret agents seem to use invisible

inks any more. In 2011, the CIA declassified

its own invisible ink recipes and published

them online. Tis initiated Amy Suo Wu’s

research into invisible inks. Working at the

fringes of graphic design, art, media research

and activism, Wu does not reactivate invisible

inks for simple aesthetic reasons. Neither is her

project just about the post-digital, neo-analog

appeal of these inks.

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Inmaterial 04. Florian Cramer

True, cryptography is digital by definition,

whereas steganography can be both digital and

analog. If the previous sentence sounds coun-

ter-intuitive, here’s more explanation: Modern

cryptography - the encryption and decryption

of symbols using a code - is mathematical. (It

even is a discipline of applied mathematics.) It

therefore is digital according to the scientific

definition of the word, as information proces-

sing of countable units. Tat means crypto-

graphy is even digital when it does not involve

zeros and ones in an electronic computing

device (the colloquial definition of “digital”),

but the replacement of letters through code

numbers on a piece of paper.

But, to return to steganography, when stegano-

graphy is digital it can, for example, involve hi-

ding a text message in a JPEG image file, with

the text only becoming visible if one opens the

file in a text editor instead of an image viewer.

Examples of digital yet non-electronic stega-

nography include secret texts embedded into

non-secret texts, for example through the first

words of each paragraph. Amy Suo Wu’s in-

visible ink works are good examples of analog

steganography, since they involve no mathe-

matics and no shuffling of letters and numbers,

but only chemistry. Uncovering the covert

message is just a matter of heating or chemica-

lly treating a piece of paper or canvas.

Based on such simple means and household

items, invisible ink makes secret communi-

cation accessible for everyone. It makes more

sense today than a few years ago, when softwa-

re promised better protection.

On closer inspection, after Edward Snowden’s

disclosure of global digital communication

surveillance, analog steganography has always

been a good way of protecting one’s priva-

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cy instead of being merely a playful device.

Yes, hackers and crypto activists made mili-

tary-grade encryption software (PGP, TOR,

OpenSSH, VeraCrypt) available to the masses,

freely. But Wu knows the issues of their practi-

cal use from first-hand experience. As co-host

of a series of CryptoParties in Rotterdam

- community events that teach everyone the

basics of internet privacy and communication

encryption - she witnessed again and again

how this software asks too much of people

with average computer skills. Tis turned out

to be more than simply a problem of education

or training, but amounted to a major privacy

issue. Te lack of technical expertise leading

to incompetent use of encryption softwa-

re - with only one mistake (such as a weak

password) compromising security altogether

- created an even more problematic situation

in which people compromise their privacy, but

communicate carelessly because they think

they’re safe. Tis not only concerns safety from

government espionage, but also data-mining

by internet corporations, blackmailing through

cyber criminals, and, increasingly, hacking into

the computers and mobile devices of political

activists in order to leak all their personal data

to public internet forums. Tis has become a

common practice among members of politi-

cal subcultures like the Alt-Right to discredit

black victims of police shootings post-mortem

and to harass feminist computer game develo-

pers and critics.

False sense of security through incompetent

crypto use thus makes things worse in the end,

similar to using a self-defense weapon to lite-

rally shoot oneself in the foot. Snowden disclo-

sed that anyone in the world who uses strong

encryption software, such as the programs

mentioned above, is automatically considered a

terrorist suspect by intelligence services such as

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Inmaterial 04. Florian Cramer

the NSA, and will end up on suspect lists and

become a target and fair game for interception

and wiretapping.

Memory serves as a tactical weapon in this

game. Intercepted messages whose encryption

today’s computers can’t decipher in reasonable

amounts of time are routinely being archived

so that their encryption may be cracked some

day in the future when faster computers are

available. Under these conditions of a cold

info war, Wu’s invisible ink works are more

than just highly enjoyable pieces of visual art

and calligraphic design (and pieces of truly,

socially interactive art and design on top of

that). As a combination of exhibition works,

toolkit manuals and workshops, they are also

pieces of practical media research and activism.

But most importantly, they give something

useful to people. Bypassing internet survei-

llance by bypassing the internet is no longer

a fringe idea. What was begun by artists like

Heath Bunting in the early 2000s and exten-

ded to filesharing communities by the 2010s

- where movies, music and scanned books are

increasingly shared Samizdat-style via hard

drives and USB sticks to avoid the legal risk of

getting caught online - still lacks an equivalent

for person-to-person correspondence. Using

under-the-radar techniques such as analog ste-

ganography for these purposes is not a bad idea

at all. Her work literally is an experimentation

lab for invisible inks and other steganographic

techniques, and therefore just the beginning

of a practice that is meant to leave behind the

space where it is now being shown.

Of course, calligraphic steganography is not

a novel technique. Te 15th century Voynich

Manuscript, a codex of unknown origins writ-

ten in an unknown alphabet with cryptic floral

and half-nude women illustrations, has not

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been deciphered until today, despite countless

intense efforts of professional and amateur

cryptoanalysts since 1912, the year of its

acquisition through the antiquarian bookseller

Wilfrid Voynich. In 2004 and 2016, its current

owner, Yale University, published it as photo-

graphic facsimile reproductions, first online

and later also as a print book. If the Voynich

Manuscript really is a piece of steganography

- the practice was common in its time and

first described under this name by the German

occultist and polymath Johannes Trithemius

around 1499 - then it not only demonstrates

the resilience of steganography, but also its

extraordinary creative potential, visual-tactile

richness and eccentricity.

A different way of phrasing this: analog

steganography in general, and invisible inks

in particular, promise to turn privacy from

a nuisance into something more enjoyable.

While this might sound overly hedonistic or

even lazy, its importance should not be un-

derestimated. Fun with steganography bears

genuine political potential because it could be a

working counter-narrative to the way corporate

apps and hardware gadgets - from Facebook’s

social networks to Google’s GMail and the

Android smartphone operating system - make

their users trade in privacy for enjoyable user

experiences. (Using PGP for E-Mail is neither

enjoyable nor creative, and the intellectual

reward of having understood asymmetric key

encryption quickly gets stale).

Non-existent and really-existing obfuscation,

fact and fiction, paranoid imagination that turns

out to be utter realism - these typical parame-

ters make crypto culture an applied mind game,

but limit its social scope. “Cryptography for the

masses”, a typical activist endeavor, therefore has

been doomed to fail and end up as an oxymoron.

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Inmaterial 04. Florian Cramer

Newspaper reports from November 2016 su-

ggest that steganography is now being used in

computer malware, embedding the virus code

into images on infected computers in order to

bypass virus scanners. Antivirus software will

likely be updated with image recognition algo-

rithms to prevent this in the future. Likewise,

invisible ink steganography may no longer fly

under the surveillance radar once it becomes

widely adopted. (Tis would be the beginning

of a post-digital, post-big data era for intelli-

gence services, following a trend that began in

the arts.)

Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of

Human Rights declares that “everyone has the

right to freedom of opinion and expression;

this right includes freedom to hold opinions

without interference and to seek, receive and

impart information and ideas through any

media and regardless of frontiers”. In a time

of ubiquitous hate speech trolling, combined

with governmental-corporate communication

surveillance, this concept has been simulta-

neously hijacked and undermined. Despite this,

“freedom of expression [...] without interfe-

rence [...] through any media and regardless of

frontiers” still is a sound practical explication of

invisible ink experiments. So these words have

become a project description instead of a right

that everyone has.

Florian Cramer

lecturer in 21st century visual culture at Rotterdam University of

Applied Sciences, where he is affiliated to the Willem de Kooning Aca-

demy and the Piet Zwart Institute. Last publications: Cramer, F., 2013.

Anti-media: ephemera on speculative arts, Studies in network cultures. Rot-

terdam: Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi Uitgevers/Publishers).

Cramer, F., 2014. What is ‘Post-digital’? APRJA, 3. Reprint 2016.

Chun, W.H.K., Fisher, A.W., and Keenan, T. (editors). New media, old

media: a history and theory reader, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

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