Derek Frech: Secure Document

Derek Frech is an American artist working out of Brooklyn, New York. He is using encryption algorithms and technology to encrypt his own prints and animations, where the constructs and devices intended to provide security become the content. His work Secure Document exhibited at Actual Size Gallery in Los Angeles in the fall of 2014.

Here is a link to a part of Frech's works, a video from the exhibit. 

“Actual Size is pleased to present Secure Document, an exhibition of recent works by Derek Frech, curated by Park Myers. Secure Document consists of three main works in which Frech has established a lexicon of encryption using security measures and mechanisms of information protection. Each work as well as the exhibition in its entirety strips its original content to a point in which the constructs and devices intended to provide security become the content.

Secure Document is comprised of works that seize encryption technologies and alter them symbolically and materially. Works in the exhibition include Encrypted Documents, a series of layered prints in which an appropriated and reformed algorithm used for the encryption of visual information is applied to documents containing redacted information. Only a selection of the prints from this series will be on display, while the additional prints will be housed in a protective case in the gallery. Untitled, a screen-based animation, distorts information to a point of unintelligibility to address the cycles of abstraction that data must undergo in order to be communicated. Tamper Evident is created through a print and removal process on metal in which forms of residue and mark making become physical allusions to digital distortion.

The exhibition restructures the hierarchies of information transmission and reception to direct the viewer to the hidden mechanics of communication. Secure Document focuses on the issues of how supposed authenticated information is understood, and the invisible modifications, mediations and subsequent forms of reception that are involved in visual communication.” – Actual Size