Forgot Your Password? (It’s here)

“Forgot Your Password?” is a series of books that contain a few gigabytes of decrypted passwords from the 2012 LinkedIn user database leak incident. It is a physical archive of the past event, it is an artist expression that encapsulates Aram Bartholl’s weaving of his thoughts on passwords and the incident, and more literally, it is a question Aram is throwing at us, the audience.

“Forgot Your Password?”

I like how this title changes our conception of this work, from a seemingly monotonous list of passwords to suddenly a curious collection of perhaps the most sensitive personal information of people living the digital age (which, of course, includes me!). It implicitly evokes this provocative tone that I’m no exception to such incidents and that my passwords are just not well-protected as that of the others.

What makes the message even more effective is the cold, monotonous, static, black-and-white, yet succinct style of this piece. Coloring the book mostly pure white and leaving the text black feels almost apathetic as if the author was trying to distant himself from the piece. The general tone of the style is almost overwhelming due to its strong contrast, but the overwhelmingness does add some weight to the content of this book.

I love the fact that this piece naturally leads to a series of interesting questions to think about.

• “Are my passwords in these books?” (And the fact that you won’t get an answer to this question by typing your passwords into a magic search bar but actually need to put some efforts to turn the pages is mind-blowing when everything is searchable with Google and Ctrl-F these days)
• “Do people put their names or the names of their beloved people in passwords?”
• “What do passwords mean to different people? Are they just random sequences of random words? Or do they bear a significant in our lives?”

Nonetheless, this art piece doesn’t provide any good pragmatic solution to the issue that is being touched by the author. The message and the intention of the author are rather unclear and are only partially guessable.

“What should I do if I find my passwords in this book?”
“What should I do to protect myself from such cybersecurity threats?”

I feel like the apathetic tone of the author does not stand strong from this practical perspective.

After all, I ended up landing on a website that approached the same issue from a very pragmatic perspective to raise people’s awareness on cyber security and passwords management. While the physical form of a “book” does provide a unique experience, it can never beat this website on its effectiveness to convey a strong message to the audience.

https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords

I discovered that my old password was “pwned” multiple times, but my new passwords seem to be safe for now!