Synthesis Graphics

Many of the most popular websites on the internet employ a tracking technique known as Canvas Fingerprinting – a process that evades ad blocking technology by analyzing the visitor’s computer capabilities. Canvas Fingerprinting takes place in the computer user’s web browser’s canvas element – a rectangular space rendered in the browser which is meant to draw vector graphics instructed by code. Online advertising companies found that an individual can be tracked based on the nuance of how their computer’s hardware and software render elements on the HTML canvas element such as fonts, shadows, and color. After the instructions to render an image are sent to the canvas, they are then translated back to code that is sent to the surveilling entities. Within this process slight differences between how devices rendered an image are recorded that help profile the visitor.

Aesthetically, these operational surveillance graphics are perplexing, typical graphics include: triangles with gradient fills, overlapping circles of color, emojis, text strings set in various fonts and intensities of shadows, and simple rectangular gradients. With some exceptions they use wild color palettes, seemingly at random. Text strings will either appear to be random codes, or use well established pangrams (“Cwm fjordbank glyphs vext quiz”). Their compositions are haphazard, with oddly placed whitespace, disproportionate scale, and rupturing boundaries. 

Surveillance Graphics blows up two of these graphics – found on sites such as baidu.com, yahoo.com, vk.com and accuweather.com – to a super scale.