IBID
As the martini was to the 1950s, so is kale to our times — a towering and unavoidable presence in the cultural landscape. Michael Portnoy consulted with a team of futurologists, trend forecasters, environmental scientists and agricultural experts to predict what will be the new hot vegetable twenty years from now. Although the Kalochromes appear to be innocent bitmapped images of kale screenprinted onto canvas, they are actually encrypted images of photographs of another vegetable — the “kale of 2034.” In image steganography, the digital information for one image (or message) is hidden within the digital information of another image. An especially robust technique of steganography was developed with a leading cryptography expert so that the images could withstand the most aggressive forms of cryptanalysis. Twenty years from now, the decryption key to the Kalochromes will be provided, so the images of the predicted vegetable can be revealed.