Alexandra Midal: Do You Speak Flower?

Do You Speak Flower? explores a field at the intersection of flowers and steganography. Steganography involves concealing secret information within an image, message, or physical object to avoid detection. From a technical perspective, steganography has the distinction of being invisible, unlike cryptography, which encrypts information to conceal it and thus signal the existence of a message to be decrypted. More simply, cryptography conceals meaning, while steganography conceals the very existence of a secret.
Through a number of case studies at the intersection of design, art, and architecture, often flirting with popular culture, this essay surveys the range of concealment practices employed by designers and artists, but especially by dissidents, revolutionaries, and agitators of all kinds who wish to communicate in secret without attracting suspicion. More specifically, it explores the unsuspected tactics of concealment that can lurk beneath the delicate and romantic language of floriography.