Play the below track at minute 3:30 while playing with the sketch.

*Trigger WARNING: Please be aware before pressing, as the sketch contains flash animation.

I wanted to show that Lebanon has become a sink hole, and the sink hole simile we use when we speak about the Lebanese politicians and them entering the garbage sink hole of history. My sketch shows the revolving sink hole which keeps drawing itself and drawing history over and over again by erasing and re-drawing. Here when un-clicked, the hidden message becomes hidden again and only shows back when clicked. Politicians in Lebanon, rarely change and the corrupt ones i.e the thives keep coming with every click; it's like a new history is being written but the end result is the same. My main message for the Lebanese people is to revolt because of all the corruption which has been caused by the Lebanese politicians who are thieves. Thieves of stealing tax-payer's money instead of reforming and developing the country. They have been doing it for so many years that the Lebanese people have lost hope, even after revolting in 2019, they have lost hope again. And my message comes to remind them of the corruption and the need to keep revolting and not to stop. I had to hide the object that I'm attacking which is the politicians because of the surveillance in Lebanon and the attemps from the ruling government to limit the freedome of speech. Unless given directions, not everyone can uncover the message and using steganography is the perfect technique for this piece. My message afterall is: No matter how hard you try to hide the truth it'll always show, they are thieves. It will stay hightlighted in white showing over any noise, that's trying to seal it.

Design Process

The first starting point for this assignment was brainstorming on the topic I'd like to highlight. Naturally, I'm inclined to talk about the corruption in Lebanon, and the corrupt politicians there who are responsible the country's economic failure for the past 30 years. I used the Moiré Pattern inspired by Nazia Fakhruddin works https://medium.com/@naziafakhruddin/the-mysterious-moir%C3%A9-pattern-49d797897355. The revolving sink-hole served my purpose well, and this lead me to hiding one of the messages in the the repurposed Moire pattern. The hidden message is a string: 'POLITICIANS'; as seen in the screenshot on the left.

I incorporated the moire pattern and anaglyph in separate parts of the sketch. As seen in the images below, the words "ARE Thieves" show when the mouse is clicked over the area they're in as I colored them white, same as the background; so when the mouse draws under them, we see them better from the contrast in colors.

I used the blendMode to get the contrast in colors when the mouse is pressed: [if (mouseIsPressed) { blendMode(DIFFERENCE)] I used the combination from Xin's Youtube tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDn7y4nWekE&feature=youtu.be blendMode() + Loops - Anaglyph Illusion

I added rotate to the drawing with angles that behave differently throughout. for "REVOLT" the angle rotates at [angle += 0.5].

for "Corruption" it's being drawn over and over again with the drawing of the sinkhole and rotating at [rotate(10 + angle)]

I also had some lines being drawn to give more animation effects [line( i + mouseX, 100, i + mouseX, 150)] when the mouse is hovering over the white area, we can see the lines being drawn.