ABSTRACT
Aleksandra Kaminska is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, Canada, where she also co-directs the Artefact Lab and the Bricolab. In popular culture and speech, we tend to apply it to the idea of being authentic, as a manifestation of someone identity through appearance or performance. The move came from an interest in printing well, with quality rather than quantity, and in developing new technologies and techniques—motivations which allow us to understand how making paper valuable, unique, and trustworthy became hallmarks for the production of authentic papers. The chip as authentication device thus works to both confirm the legitimacy of the passport and the passport holder, and is largely considered now as a decisive authentication device in passports. The signature is a good example of a device that teeters ambiguously across the analog-digital divide, and one that we still use widely to mark documents.
