Four Letter Words
installation
Four Letter Words proposes a method for reconciling the citizens' desire for information with the governments desire to make policy in secret. The solution put forward is one in which digital clock towers found throughout the country's towns and cities are appropriated and modified. The clock displays are repurposed to broadcast drafts of proposed legislation to the public. The technical limitations of the digital displays force the texts to be distilled down to the four letter words that it allows. Certain characters are difficult to represent, which further obfuscates the messages. The proposal promises government agencies a legitimate way to inform the public before instituting policies, without sincerely doing so.
Demonstration: Domestic Security Enhancement Act
"A demonstration of the system, using a portion of the Patriot Act II is shown here. A draft of the Patriot Act II (Domestic Security Enhancement Act) was leaked to the public and caused a backlash that delayed the Department of Justice's ability to secretly arrest and imprison US citizens for years. Had the Four Letter Words system been in place, the DOJ itself could have released the drafts to the public. This may have saved the department the embarrassment of being accused of nullifying the Bill of Rights in secret."
The Prototype
This project has taken several physical forms, with the eventual goal being installation in a publicly displayed clock like the one pictured above.
The Quicktime video above was captured from a working version of the system, built with Processing. I created a perl script to extract all of the four letter words from the Domestic Security Enhancement Act. The Processing application reads a text file containing those words and draws each of them in 7-segment characters. Each segment is drawn from individual Scalable Vector Graphics pieces. My Processing sketch can be viewed here. This version of Four Letter Words has been projected at 12 feet wide to approximate the size of an actual installation in a large digital clock.
A physical model of Four Letter Words was created using the Arduino microcontroller and four 7-segment LED displays. The microcontroller accepts alphanumeric data via a serial connection and displays the letters on the LED displays. Depending on the hardware requirements of an actual clock tower, which I have yet to determine, a similar microcontroller-based design may be used to hijack the clock's normal operation.