desImages

'i am still alive' is a plaintext made up of sixteen ISO-8859-1 characters encrypted into a 128-bit ciphertext using the DES algorithm in ECB mode. The phrase refers to Japanese artist On Kawara's canonical series of telegram artworks from 1969. Upon encryption, the ciphertext is then divided up into sixteen units of 8-bit value. Each unit is used to derive the shades of sixteen squares, which are layered on each other in a manner similar to the paintings 'Homage to the Square' by German-American artist Josef Albers. The leftmost 8-bit value corresponds to the shade of the outermost square, while the rightmost value corresponds to the shade of the innermost square. Each token is titled with a UTC date written in the ISO-8601 format (YYYYMMDD) between 2020-01-01 and the timestamp date of the current block. These eight ISO-8859-1 characters form a 64-bit key for the DES algorithm.