Contesting the “Dark Web”. CipherSongs: Trustless an installation for encrypted data streams

Rob Canning composed CipherSongs which one currently can tune into on http://cipher.kiben.net/

The abstract of his paper for BFX describes CipherSongs as:

CipherSongs: Trustless is the first in a proposed series of performance and installation works reflecting on issues surrounding encrypted network communication technologies. It is a data driven, audio visual installation which responds to real-time data from the Bitmessage service. Bitmessage is a decentralised, peer-to-peer, trustless communications protocol (Warren, 2012), the service became particularly popular after the 2013 Snowden revelations exposing the widespread collection and analysis of communications metadata. These works respond to the threat to our “right to a private life” (Article 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998) posed by the recently elected Conservative government’s plans to amend the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) (Home Office, 2014). The proposed amendment to DRIPA, commonly referred to as “The Snoopers’ Charter”, seeks to abolish the use of encrypted communications in the UK16 . In this context, CipherSongs functions as the ‘canary in the coal mine’, an early warning system where the disappearance of song indicates a dangerous problem within the system.

The installation operates as an agent within the system it references, it is actively engaged with the data and political context that are its subjects. As nodes within both the Tor network and the Bitmessanger system it provides extra robustness and diversity to their decentralised infrastructures. It critiques the dominant assertions of the mainstream or “strategic media” which aligns users of strong cryptography with the “Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse”: drug dealers, paedophiles, money launderers and terrorists (May, 1994).