dirtstyle cipher: Girl on Road

 The dirtstyle cipher, exists in a speculative future where encrypted images are the final frontier of unsurveilled communication, and algorithms emerge as sacred script.

Originally an aesthetic movement of the 1990s web 2.0 era, dirtstyle embraced antialiased media, system styling, and was vehemently anti-upgrade. In this body of work, dirtstyle is repurposed and brought to life as a tactical framework, and taking on an expanded range of technology. Randomness, entropy, composting and decay are slated toward a merger between disparate, low fidelity essence not usually associated with high tech work.

Drawing from a curated archive of media—film, web detritus, personal image libraries, and texts—the dirtstyle cipher harnesses bit plane decomposition as a mode of encryption. Images are separated into eight bit planes and recomposed with the sender’s message inside. In dirtstyle cipher, we witness a machine frozen in time and on display as an artefact of this once hidden world. Caught in limbo the program loops. Ciphers evolve and feedback onto themselves, creating messages within messages—an endless abstraction of communication.