Anonymity — From signal to noise: Nym Gallery art contest

$5,000 up for grabs for the best art around noise and privacy

Author: Nym

August 13, 20243 mins read

$5,000 up for grabs for the best art around noise and privacy

Calling all artists-agitators, privacy-enthusiast memers, and weirdo dreamers! Want a chance to earn some cash with your clever designs? The new Nym Gallery is launching a contest to generate the best images around noise and online privacy.

Languages: Türkçe // 日本 // Bahasa Indonesia // Русский // Française // Português // українська мова // 中文 // Español

What is Nym Gallery?

Images are a powerful way to convey complex ideas and systems. And privacy technologies like the Nym mixnet are no exception. Nym thus invites everyone to come up with new and innovative ways to represent becoming anonymous online through noise.

The goal is to give people around the world aesthetic illustrations of how online anonymity works and why it is so important. In this way, art can also be pedagogical and activist, helping people understand the need for new, sophisticated privacy technologies.

All images will be public, allowing anyone to enjoy, learn from, discuss, or even just laugh about the Nym Gallery masterpieces.

Read on for how to participate!

“From signal to noise — for anonymity!”

Noise: Interference, cover, scrambling, asynchrony, confusion, the unclear.

What do these “noise” senses and effects have to do with privacy? A lot, actually.

Imagine you’re being followed, and you can’t shake the trail. Suddenly you see a large crowd gathering — say in a street festival — and you decide to blend into the noise and commotion of the crowd. Tracking you in the mass of bodies and sounds gets quite difficult. Noise hides, protects, cloaks you.

Or imagine you’re trying to have a private conversation at a party, and you move closer to the speakers so that your whispers are drowned out by the noise of the music.

These are basic situations, but they convey something important about how communication signals can be protected by noise techniques, cover traffic, and the blurring or scrambling of the messages we want to transmit. Afterall, our basic need to be private online is constantly threatened by complex surveillance systems always snooping in on what we do and say.

How to participate

It’s simple:

Follow @Nymproject on Twitter/X if you haven’t already
Reply to the contest notification with your best image of noise for anonymity
Retweet the open call tweet to spread the word

The artwork doesn’t need to be new: it can be old, minted, unminted, on any chain!