(Kalinovska) Let’s talk about how you moved from your environmental interests to focus on government and its political/international affairs.

(Sanborn)That happened about 1988. After working for eight years with invisible forces of the earth and nature, I decided to accept a commission from the General Services Administration for the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. I was chosen for the project because I had worked with invisible forces in the past, and the jurors felt that they were working with a commission for an agency that dealt with invisible forces, albeit man-made ones. This was an obvious philosophical stretch, but one thing did occur when I accepted the commission. I had something of an epiphany in the research I did about the agency, actually the science of espionage. I realized there is a connection between the sciences and the invisible forces of man. I read widely on subjects as disparate as the mathematics of number theory, the algorithms of cryptography, the science of spying, the optics involved in satellite imagery, and the electronics in eavesdropping, and I realized that there is a very large scientific component to the work of espionage agencies. This was true for the KGB as well as the CIA.

(Kalinovska) Could you describe the process of working on Kryptos (1988-90), the curved copper screen for the CIA inner courtyard and entrance, which you designed with plants, trees, pools of water, petrified trees, and lodestones. [...]

(Sanborn) I have to preface this by saying that I was born in Washington, DC., and I am very familiar with government agencies. In my first walk-through at the CIA I was stunned. They had built a new building, and it was still painted institutional green on the inside. I was very surprised that this building, which was supposed to be state of the art in 1990, still had a lot of the old governmental vestiges. The hallways were warrenlike for obvious security reasons. The windows were partially blocked, and a large part of it was underground. I decided to do the commission because I felt as if I might be able to make some sort of difference, in that I could work from the inside and somehow affect the thinking of the CIA. As naive as it seems, I attempted to do that. What I chose for the piece was to deal with the science of cryptography. Cryptography began in mathematics. Codes were developed, even from Caesar’s time, based on number theory and mathematical principles. I decided to use those principles and designed a work that is encoded. I wrote a fairly extensive text, then encoded it into a matrix system, which seemed to me, as an artist, to be fairly simple. I figured it would take the agency a year or two to decode, when, in fact, it took them almost eight years to get part of it. To date, they haven’t cracked the other part. It ended up being something of a challenge for them to do. Physically the piece sits in the absolute center of the agency, in a courtyard, and perhaps it taunts them every day to think about something other than the documents they are working on at any given time.

(Kalinovska) Since then, you must feel that merging politics with art is another way of communicating with the world.

(Sanborn) I adapted fairly quickly to that and discovered an underlying political motivation that didn’t know existed before that time. What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.

(Kalinovska) Would you say that the CIA project and the experience associated with it led to your understanding that what is elegant, on the one hand, may not necessarily be so elegant from another point of view? Did the opposition of surface and content, of aesthetic surface hiding disturbing content, lead to other socially concerned projects during 1990s?

(Sanborn)Yes. Within a year of doing the CIA commission, I did an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery, in 1992, called Covert Obsolescence, which consisted of The Code Room and The Listening Post [...].

From the titles you can see I was dealing with espionage in light of the Cold War. I saw the work of the agency as still reflecting a Cold War mentality, where the KGB versus the CIA was the big topic. But from about 1990 to today the topic has shifted tremendously. So now it’s the CIA and Moussad versus Islamic radicals, et cetera. The Corcoran installation had some references to Greek mythology. There was a freestanding cylinder in the center of the room that was totally perforated with encoded text. Half of the cylinder was perforated text dealing with CIA operations. The other half of the cylinder dealt with KGB operations. The two existed side by side. A pinpoint light inside the cylinder projected these encoded texts, including the word Medusa, which was embedded in the texts, over the inside of the gallery, so that they covered every inch of its surface. It created an effect where Medusa’s gaze, represented by these bright texts, fell over one’s body as one walked through the room. There was a petrified tree in the room, a tree that had turned into stone. I felt as if the projected light was a visible ray that was as toxic as the information on that cylinder. It was a transformation from a text written to a text projected to a text that became toxic when it touched your body.

(Kalinovska) Where did these texts come from?

(Sanborn) The text I chose was directly drawn from KGB and CIA documents that I had obtained from the Library of Congress and from a former KGB operative. One room was the projected text; the other room was the listening post. In the basements of embassies throughout the world and in Washington there are rooms that are covered with copper screen, and they are used for encoding and decoding incoming and outgoing messages. The code room that I used in the Corcoran installation was made entirely of pulped CIA documents that I obtained from the agency. Until 1991, the agency produced tons of these documents every day. They were destroyed at the end of each day and were taken from the agency in a pulped form. I made a deal with the director of Central Intelligence in which I gained access to this pulped material in exchange for offering part of the code of my CIA sculpture.