i'm new to the group -- has anyone discussed the relationship between watermarks and logos in PR? i thought the entire novel was an exploration of these two concepts. i was thinking of logos as ostentatious attempts to assert ownership, while watermarks are their (often) invisible counterparts, silently claiming provenance on the sly. logos create value by being identifiable, and trademark-protected. the watermarks on the footage were intended to never become associated with its producer. cayce's perverse relationship to logos (she sytematically effaces them) prefigures her ultimate accomplishment in the novel: i.e., revealing the source of the footage.

i'm doing research on fashion and intellectual property law and so i'd love to explore this topic further!

That's an incredibly cogent statement. I'm going to have to give that some thought and follow-up later.

interesting point JKB. the watermarks were for tracing it and seeing where the footage went, so it identified the "user" rather than the maker. kind of a mirror to branding.

the other part of the watermarks is the t pattern with "addresses" and a street like matrix to it. is this an actual map, the lack of match to existing maps on the web says no, but could it be a map of Nora's brain and how it needed to be reconnected. is Nora trying to put the connections back in place through connecting the footage somehow. don't know that is what WG intended, but it is interesting to think about it.

as i understand it, traditional watermarks were a bit like logos - in an understated, upper-class kind of way. marks of quality of fine paper. the digital watermarks in PR (and in real life digital art) are invisible - which poses a real limitation for anything aspiring to the status of logo. more of a copyright marker than a logo. the crypto / steganography aspect is interesting. crypto so often plays a major fetish role for cyberpunk writers and readers (including myself in my geekier moments), but WG has mostly avoided falling into that, being more interesting in things social than things crypto...

well, probably the best NOVEL featuring crypto is neal stephenson's CRYPTONOMICON - there's a website for it that i recently ran across but haven't explored:
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/
but like PR, it isn't obviously science fiction, being set in something very much like the present (and in WWII).
don't know of any fiction that deals with watermarking per se.
there's a lot of non-fiction on crypto that makes gripping reading, such as david kahn's CODEBREAKERS.
two recent movies have dealt with some of crucial history of crypto - ENIGMA and U-571 (i think), both looking at attempts to break german u-boat encryption.

I for one cannot overstate how delighted I was at the discovery of the watermark. It was brilliantly conceived, and I should add, beautiful. (That's right, and I'm not even going to qualify that statement). Previous comments have touched on the matter, but I'd like to look at it in some different terms. First, it does, as someone said, identify the user, but it identifies more than that: at the same time, it points to an interaction with the maker. The watermark in the fragment, as in paper of bygone eras, guarantees authenticity & originality - it may seem simply elitist, but in a book that looks to be disgusted with derivativeness (cf Hilfiger label), which is defined as "devoid of soul," authenticity is more related to metaphysics than to snobbery.

Also, presumably, it refers to a pattern beneath all the fragments (it was theorized at one point that all the fragments bore a watermark, no?). In either case I will make the obvious observation that the esteemed WG is hinting at some kind of underlying pattern to fiction generally, his own Pattern Recognition specifically, and life entirely. Ye olde discordia concord. More theology for you, though I am an enlightened individual, I promise. Though to complicate matters, one doesn't have much hope in knowing the difference between pattern recognition and apophenia.

I was thinking, if there is an anaolg to the watermark in the world, or, say, in each individual, what would it be? The only thing I could come up with is death. Heidigger said, or so I hear - I'll pretend a lot of things, but I won't pretend to have read a word he wrote - that the only way to live "originally" is in contemplation of death. Apparently "angst" in the contemporary sense comes from him. Don't ask me how he arrived at that, but it seemed relevant. Anyway, angst hasn't been original for some time now.

Yours angstily,
P.C.

The human genome?

How does the watermark (and the logo for that matter) compare to the meme? If a meme is an idea that has a life of its own -- a trend, a musical hook, a beat, a hem-length -- has it escaped the scourge of ownership? Is it possible that intellectual property law, in conjunction with the rise of digital culture, will eventually make all memes someone's property? Will memes be watermarked?

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Originally posted by glumgluf70:

I was thinking, if there is an anaolg to the watermark in the world, or, say, in each individual, what would it be? The only thing I could come up with is death. Heidigger said, or so I hear - I'll pretend a lot of things, but I won't pretend to have read a word he wrote - that the only way to live "originally" is in contemplation of death.

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I think "existential angst" is certainly one way to contemplate the watermark, but I don't have the feeling that that's the note WG strikes in his descriptions of the footage (the site of the watermark). Fans of the footage are much more paranoid than angst-ridden about it, and I mean paranoid in that fun, look-at-how-everything-might-connect way. Cayce, certainly, finds intense pleasure in contemplation of the footage and in the connections she's made with fellow fans. And so I'm tempted to look at the life-affirming qualities of watermark. On the makers' part, it's a coy assertion of authorship -- an authorship that's joint, revelatory, and born of a joy for making meaning. To me, the interdependency of the producer/consumer suggests something more like sex than death . . .

JKB just something that may be of use or interest ....

(although it is some what removed from Mr Gibsons book)their was an artist (from New York?sorry I'm having trouble with rembering her name...)

She became famous because she used the internal watermarks on envelops of billing company letters (ie Visa, utility company's etc) and she expanded, enlarged and re produced with modifications these patterns / marks .... interesting bit re cycling.... I'll try and track down some info on her....

Nevets

Nevets --

Oh yes, please send along any information you come across. Is there anyone out there doing stuff with watermarks like what Russell Sage is doing with logos?

http://www.cayte.com/fashion/logomotion.html

Rucker also has something on (electronic) watermarks

check out the RFID technology that could brand each of us CNET RFID article

The number of the BEAST!

Seriously, this has to be one the most intelligent, flameless threads I've come across. In a way, we've all watermarked ourselves just by registering with this site since it is relatively specific (author/genre/sub-culture). We've all got an individual name we put SOME thought into that reflects either our thought-sludge at the time of creation of even something deeper. And I'm sure some of us have a presence on other sites, thus proliferating our mark across this sea of data, which, if someone were to have the right algorithm, they could use that info to figure out a little more than we'd normally care to divulge to the general net populace. Right now, I think, the web is still in DRIP mode, but with new code and ways to manipulate the data our watermark will become more of a reality. After all, they know what you eat by the signature of your data at the grocery. You think those 'discount cards' are just for price cuts?

Bones?

Just having finished PR, the sense I got was that the difference between the watermarks and the logos was how the information contained was received by the user.

In logos, our protagonist experiences an intense and emotional violation from their strong, subconsiously meme targeted messages. The more aggressively the branded information is delivered, the more ill she becomes. These logos are a visual assault on the most basic parts of the human psyche, and although most of humanity has become acustomed to filtering out the noise, the impact is never the less felt on all of us. Logos, for our unprotected hero, are nothing short of mental rape.

Watermarks, on the other hand, are by definition invisible. Undetectable by human senses, they are every bit as successful in conveying their messages as their logo counterparts, but the interaction with the target is a passive one. It is meta-data--information that needs to be actively searched for by the interactor. In the Films, the mystery creates the need to know more; the quest to discover what information is contained. Instead of shouting it's message at a hundred decibles and in nauseating color patterns, the watermark lies hidden beneath the surface, waiting to be found by an open and interested party. If logos are rape, this is pure seduction -- alluring the target with a mysterious and secret promise, it fills with passion and excitement and beyond all else, lust for the answer.

This is the new marketing technique that Bigend predicts will bring a seachange to the advertising industry -- to implant in a product the ability to create interest in the brand, not the other way around. By hiding this information in a riddle surrounded by a puzzle and invisible to the naked eye, the quest to discover unknown creator becomes the mental hook, the draw, that draws the target to the brand.

As a side note, I wonder how our hero would react to jingles and music geared to the subvasive (think of the Pepsi video by B.Spears) These are every bit as intrusive on our minds as logos and trademarks, and seem to be just as aggressively researched for their mysterious graps on the human subconscious.

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Originally posted by BlackCat:
http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/jenna_and_me.html also has something on (electronic) watermarks

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Wow! That story was a *trip*! I'd love to know how feasible it is to back up massive amounts of data in watermark form. Here's an excerpt from the story:


The Mummy Bums have a killer little applet that'll break into a target server and munge your whole hard disk contents into watermarks in the sounds and pictures on the server. Me, I've got Dogyears backed up onto an Amsterdam music site. When you listen to the Lincoln Logs play "Stink Bowl," you're reading my email, dude.



I guess what interests me the most about this possibility is the strange virtual "synesthesia" that it evokes. Any thoughts?

ps I'm so happy to see this thread's still alive!

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Originally posted by duskheart:

This is the new marketing technique that Bigend predicts will bring a seachange to the advertising industry -- to implant in a product the ability to create interest in the brand, not the other way around. By hiding this information in a riddle surrounded by a puzzle and invisible to the naked eye, the quest to discover unknown creator becomes the mental hook, the draw, that draws the target to the brand.

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I agree that Bigend intends to revolutionize the marketing & advertising industry, but won't he need a phenomenal product to do so? The only reason a cult developed around the footage was because the film/s themselves were appealing to a vast international audience -- an audience so heterogeneous that only the largest multinational companies could afford to reach them. What I'm wondering is whether this might bode well for the future of the blockbuster. Will it eventually be the case that the films that capture the imagination of a worldwide audience will be released for free online? And will blockbusters become successful because of the quality of the work rather than obscenely expensive marketing campaigns aimed at teenagers?

Duskheart: I agree with the idea that subconscious motivations can lead us towards buying or learning more about a product, which is what most marketing is based on, but is that really the job of a watermark? I've always thought that the purpose of a watermark on something was not so much to relate it to the recipient, but more to prevent counterfeiting. In the case of PR, so that if there were new sets of footage found and someone claimed that they were the artist, the true artist could prove them otherwise.