(session in progress)

Hirshhorn Museum

[Sanborn] …and so if somebody, you know, kidnapped me, and tried to get it out of me, I wouldn’t know exactly how to decode it.  But at the same time, it  made  it much harder for cryptographers to decipher this— part of the reason it took eight years.

The other reason, I think, is that the agency would certainly loathe to announce to the world that we’ve spent how many hours of supercomputer time trying to figure out the sculptures in the courtyard?  Well forget it!  They’d never do that, right?  And so they were in sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t position.  Where, which means, basically, if they did crack it, that means they spent too much time on it.  If they didn’t crack it then they were inept, and so they really have kept quite mum on the subject until just a few years ago, like 1999, when two people simultaneously said that they had found the code, that they’d discovered the code themselves.  And I thought it was interesting that two people found it, you know, to the day almost, nine years later.  But that’s, you know, for whatever reason.

Antipodes
Anyway, this piece (Antipodes) does have the coded section, and the KGB is on the other side.  And we can wander over here where it might be a little cooler when the sun comes out.

[changing focus to another sculpture]

Unless anybody has a question about this particular piece right here.

[unintelligible audience question about Kryptos]

[Sanborn] The right panel has the Kryptos text in it.  It’s not arranged the same way, but it has all the letters and all the text that’s been encoded plus an additional section.

[Sanborn switches props]

Okay, when I— about ten years before I received the CIA commission I was doing work with invisible forces of nature.  So by some strange aberration the panelists decided they could stretch that definition to include the invisible forces of mankind, somehow, and that I could do a commission for the CIA.  So when I got the commission— I got the commission, and I more or less had "carte blanche" in coming up with an idea.  That doesn’t mean that the idea would be accepted, but at least I was given open field as far as what I could propose.

And so I made— did a lot of research, and came up finally with a piece which I thought was appropriate to what most humans think the CIA does, which is operates spies, encode and decode messages, etc.  Well, in fact, the NSA are the real coding people.  The CIA isn’t.  But I figured that since most people think the CIA was the one who kept all the secrets, that did all the encoding, but also kept— that was also fine, because I— you know, it seemed to have a more popular appeal that way.

Once I got the commission I made a model, a very precise model, not unlike this model that I have.  This is now a small model of Kryptos that I’m considering selling as a multiple, okay?  And it’s an exact replica of the Kryptos screen.  It’s made out of nickel silver, but the Kryptos sculpture is oriented this way, and so the alphabet, the ABC alphabet is, if I’m holding this thing one way or the other— see if I remember— anyway, the alphabet side of Kryptos has the attempted CIA’s on this side.  This is Vigenere’s Tableau.  The decoded parts that haven’t been decoded is this bottom line here, and it’s partially covered up with a— by a piece of stone at the CIA, so it’s harder to see, and it was also harder to photograph.  So that also delayed the dissemination of the image so that people could crack it.

Now as far as people cracking it is concerned, there is some very fine line that separates really great cryptographers from totally insane people.  And so, you have no idea, over the last fifteen years, how many “cracks“ of the code I have gotten, be it email or documents.  Basically, the code is a series of passages and sentences with a finite number of characters like English characters— Roman Characters, and so if you decode it, the decode will be the same number of letters and characters as what’s on the screen.  The final section that hasn’t been decoded yet is approximately one hundred characters.  If I say it’s any more specific than that, then I’m giving you guys a clue, but I’m not gonna do that.  So it’s approximately a hundred characters.  And so, basically, if somebody cracks that— that code, when you read it, it will be a Eureka! moment when it’s cracked, and it will be approximately a hundred characters long.

So what happens if something happens to me, and the Kryptos code, you know, is lost?  Well, basically, at this point in time I have given a test to two very close friends of mine, and these people now are— [they] direct people who think they cracked the code— are now directed to these two people, and they can take their line of a hundred or so characters and line them up, and my two code-key people will say, "listen, what is your number ten letter?  What is your number 20 letter?  What is your number 56 letter?"  And if those letters don’t match up, then that’s not the code and it goes no further.  But if the code— if somebody puts their coded section in there, a hundred characters long, and it starts matching up, then I get a phone call where these people have access to the code that is now offsite in two different locations.  So that if say one building burned down, the other one would still hold the code.  And so this thing hopefully will outlive me, and it will be carried on by who knows who eventually.  But it would also be nice if someday somebody did crack this thing, because it really is crackable.  It really does say something, so that, all of that was very important to me.

While I did the code, I made my presentation.  I put my model out there.  Everybody really liked the idea and really liked the model, and was really concerned about what it was going to say, the agency people, and so I was sorta rouged to do that.  I was rouged to say, "Okay, this is what it says."  You know, hey, no problem, because what is a mysterious sculpture when there’s no mystery left?  And so, basically, what I did was the CIA decided, okay, what we will do is we will have the secret of the Kryptos Sculpture entrusted by the Department of Historical Intelligence.  Now this Department of Historical Intelligence back in 1989 when I was dealing with this was a very small room with no windows and three people inside it.  So what I did, basically, was I knew that there were three people in there.  There were three people I had to give the code to, so basically, I divided the coded section.  I cut it up into strips, and I reassembled them into three pages.  And I can give one page to each of these people, but when each of these people read it, they wouldn’t get the whole picture because they only got a certain section of it that was pieced together.  But they would get the gist that I hadn’t done something say, pornographic, or, you know, something that was— would reflect very badly on the agency.  They’d get the gist.

So I walked into the room, and the first question I asked of these three people, I said, “Listen, I really want to entrust this secret to whoever can keep a secret really well.”  And two of the people pointed to one of the other people, and they said, “She’s got an institutional memory.  She remembers every single thing she reads.”  Right?  So basically I said, “Okay, would you please leave.”  So, because I didn’t want anybody to remember what they read.  So I also put it into two pages just in case one of these people was the Savant and was gonna figure out the code from what I gave them, so basically I gave two pieces— I gave pieces of paper to each of the two people remaining in the room, and they started reading it.  And one of the individuals became very agitated and became basically hysterical, and could not handle it and had to leave the room.  And the bottom line was that these two people realized that what if I tricked them?  What if they read this code and then forever or whatever a century that sculpture sits in the middle of the agency insulting the agency, their jobs would be at stake, and it was too much pressure for them.  So they denied— they refused to keep the code.

So then basically what I did was I went to— I decided okay, what I will do, and during this time I’d also noticed a— something that was leaving the agency that I found very interesting.  Behind the agency in the big loading dock were these large dumpsters.  And the dumpsters were filled all day long by tubes coming out of the ceiling with the pulped documents that are leftover after each day at the agency.  The huge volumes of paper of secret documents that have been ground into paper pulp.  The agency ground things into paper pulp after the Iran/Iraq war and after the US Embassy was taken over and all the documents were shredded.  Large warehouses were set up and they reassembled all the shredded documents, so most secret documents are now pulped.  So I said okay well this material is really interesting, so I insanely drove up there with my car, backed it up to the loading dock, threw three five gallon pails of this stuff in, and raced out the front gate, fully expecting to be stopped, but nobody stopped me.

And I went to my studio and I built several artworks out of this paper pulp material because I really like the associative value of all those secrets in that paper.  And so I built a series of pieces.  And I still have some of them on hand, but I exhibited them in various museums and galleries.  So I said to myself, well I really like access to this material, and so I said, okay, what I’ll do is I will give William Webster, the current director of Central Intelligence an envelope containing the Kryptos code at the dedication ceremony in exchange for access to this pulp document so I could make sculpture out of it, so that was the deal that we struck.  And so at the dedication ceremony I handed over this envelope which I had constructed in such a way that it couldn’t be x-rayed.  I constructed it in such a way with various wax stamps and things like that on the surface so it couldn’t’ have been opened by somebody else other than William Webster without him knowing it.  And he winked at me when I handed him the envelope, so at least I know he was pretty genuine about keeping the code.  And I know that later, I guess about a year later, two years later, he left the CIA, and he was on one of the Saturday morning news programs.  And he said— somebody asked him, well Mr. Webster, what was the toughest secret you had to keep, and he said, “that darn sculpture in the courtyard.”  So at least I know he took it with him, and from what I understand, nobody knows the exact location of that envelope, which is fine with me, but in fact, I didn’t put it all in there, okay?

So even if they did find— it won’t mention— they won’t really have what the code says.  And I’m not saying that I’ve done something untoward in— on the screen, but none the less it does add to the mystery, because I think any artwork, and whether it’s an artwork that has the interesting color structure or an interesting abstraction, if you walk up to that artwork and you look at it and you see it and you understand it and you really click with it and it’s there, it’s all there, and— you might be less interested to go back and see it, because you grasped everything that was in it already.  Well the idea of art, hopefully decent art, is that it continues to grab you and there’s some mystery retained in it.  And so that’s one reason I made the Kryptos sculpture the way that I made it.  Well anyway, so this energizer bunny of my artworks, which this thing is ended up being, from time to time, somebody cracks part of it,  And then most recently, I had this fan that I didn’t know about, and his name— this fella named Dan Brown, and so I guess about a few months ago— six months ago Wired Magazine did an article about the Kryptos Sculpture, and during the course of the interviews it was intimated that somehow my sculpture was involved in the Da Vinci Code, and I said, “Oh really?!  That’s interesting.”  I didn’t really go any further with it.  I hadn’t read the book by that time, and so when I got the article itself, you know, I read the article, and there was these little signs and things like this showing where my actual pieces of my text and code were on the cover of the book, and that in addition to that, a competition had been sponsored and announced by the publishing company and announced on Good Morning America that they sponsored a competition to find several codes in the cover of the book.  And so when people— whoever cracked the code on the book, whoever found those codes would be sent on an all-expenses paid to Paris, an all expenses-trip paid to Paris, and I said, “well why not me?!  I wouldn’t mind going to Paris!”  But anyway that’s the way it is.

Gibson & Brown

So, Good Morning America comes on and the person who won it is there, and Charlie Gibson and Dan Brown are standing in front of a book about the Da Vinci Code.  And there air— are several passages and so if you look at the Da Vinci Code cover the way that it is now, the original hard-cover version, on the back cover if you hold it up on very strong light, you can find very fine, faint longitude and latitude coordinates.  Those longitude latitude coordinates were the coordinates that were on my sculpture that I mentioned earlier.  In addition to those longitude latitude coordinates there was another passage in there, and it’s in mirror writing like Da Vinci always wrote most of his text in mirror writing anyway, and in that text it’s written, “Only WW knows.”  Well, the meaning was only William Webster.  Well on Good Morning America, Charlie Gibson said “what does this mean?”  And he said, “Well this— there’s this longitude latitude coordinates which— where the sculpture at the CIA by Jim Sanborn,” and Charlie said one of the coordinates is off by one degree, and Dan Brown said, “Yes, well I’ll tell you why in my next book.”

Well, I sorta  at that point collapsed on the couch, right?  And said, “well now this is interesting.”  And so then goes over and says, “What’s this passage down here?”  That passages says, “Only WW knows.”  And Dan Brown asked Charlie Gibson, “What does that mean?”  And Charlie said, “Well I think it means only William Webster, because I interviewed Sanborn ten years ago about the CIA sculpture.”   And then Dan Brown says, “Well you know, actually”— can’t remember quite how he said it.  He didn’t say, “I believe.”  He said more like, “It’s been suggested that it actually is Mary Magdalene upside-down.”  WW’s MM upside-down.  Well I sunk a little deeper in the couch.  And I went and read the book.

And I read the book.  And I realized that there is an object in the book that everybody’s questing for.  They’re all looking for this thing.  What it is, it’s a cylindrical form with alphabets written all the way around it, and these alphabets form an object that’s a cylinder encoding decoding machine.  And this kind of decoding machine inspired me many years ago, and I developed a whole body of work around this cylindrical encoding machine.  And if you actually take the Kryptos sculpture and you turn it onto itself and wrap it into a circle it makes this cylinder with text that goes all the way around it.  Now an encoding decoding machine, you can take these lines of text and rotate them and align various lines of text up with decoded text and encoded text, and you can actually crack codes with these kinds of machine.

Well this object that I have since been commissioned to put in various universities around the country, and there are actually two large pieces at the entrance to the convention center just inside the doors there.  These cylinders I call projection cylinders, and you know, my sculptures called Kryptos, and in the Da Vinci Code this little machine that’s the cylindrical decoding machine is called Cryptex.  So that’s very close, so I sink a little deeper in the couch.  So anyway, so there is some relationship to the Da Vinci Code, which will be, I suppose, more clearly delineated when the new book comes out.

But I’ll tell you there are many books now being sold on the Internet.  There’s a new book down at Barnes and Noble, speculative inquiries into the next Dan Brown book after the Da Vinci Code, and Kryptos is either on the cover of some of those books or its buried in the book some— buried into these books.  And it shows that there is some relationship here, all of which sort of accidentally happened to my Kryptos sculpture.  Now how do I feel about it?  Well, I feel it just may be a little bit like— like Dorothy when the Wizard of Oz with Toto out there walking out there along the planes in Nebraska, a tornado comes along and pulls her into this giant fantasy world, and she goes down a tunnel.  Well, that’s all very interesting.  It isn’t necessarily my work, but  I can’t say that I really despise the extra publicity.  I mean, any artist appreciates a wider audience, and I do appreciate the wider audience aspect of this.  But it’s always— it’s also a strange feeling when somebody appreciates your work and perhaps loves it to death.  So, that’s nice to have a good fan, but that’s the connection with the Da Vinci Code if that is anything tangible.  How tangible it becomes with the next book, I really don’t know, but that is the Da V— that’s the way it is today.

These screens— that screen over there, when I made the CIA sculpture, this one, this one, there is approximately 2000 letters in here.  Each one of the letters on the screen at CIA was cut out by hand with a jigsaw.  It took two and a half years of cutting, seven days a week.  And I used up about ten assistants, nine hundred fifty jigsaw blades, and twelve jigsaws, cutting it out for two and half years.  This piece over here, which has many more characters, actually, was cut out in about a week by a robot with high pressure water, so all of my cylinders and all of my pieces now are pretty much cut out that way, and life is a lot simpler.

The water-jet process, though, is fairly expensive.  This smaller model which I am ultimately going to be selling as a multiple, and I have a smaller one as well— this piece is actually cut out using acid etching.  So what they do is— I work with a typography company that is local here, and they make a photographic image of the type that I’m going to use.  Then I send it to a place in California, and they make two pieces of film.  And so lets just say that this piece of metal is flat, and they take two pieces of film that are exactly the same.  And they ope— they tape one edge together, and they open it up, and they slide a piece of metal in there, and they fold down the two pieces of film over this flat piece of metal.  They expose it to light, then acid etch it all the way through simultaneously from both sides, and it gives you extremely precise, very detailed, duplicate of what you had before.  So it’s two very— [different] processes.  This piece is made of nickel silver.  That piece is made out of copper.

If anybody can think of anything I’ve forgotten, short of, “What does it say,”  Anybody gonna ask me questions? 

[unintelligible audience question]

[Sanborn] Say it again?

[audience repeat question]

[Sanborn] We’re still trying to figure out how large the addition is going to be.  The small version, which is about this tall, is gonna have almost unlimited edition.  This one is going to be a limited edition.  And this one will be signed and numbered, so it’s a different kind of piece.

[unintelligible audience question]

[Sanborn] That was dug up on an Indian reservation in Arizona.  And I have used -- at CIA there’s a large petrified tree as well, and that, I bought from a rancher in Arizona, and I’ve used petrified trees for many years.  You know the story of the Medusa, where you stare too close at the Medusa— you’re lookin’ at the Medusa’s eyes you turn to stone, well I kinda liked that whole idea over there.

Because the incendiary information of the KGB, the CIA, the two opposing forces were very hot topic, very hot material, and so I appreciated the fact that perhaps these things turned to stone on the spot when I assembled them, but that’s the idea.

[audience member] The internet has a rumor to the effect that you’re working with Dan Brown on this next book.  Is there any truth to that at all?

[Sanborn] No.

Oh yeah, no, the question was, there was a rumor on the internet that I was working with Dan Brown on this, and I answered, “no.”  I haven’t been approached.

[unintelligible audience question]

[Sanborn] Ah, yes.  Yeah, is my interest in decoding and secrecy and all of this a result of my being a native Washingtonian?   Well, yes, I’m sure it is.  I first went after the CIA, and I was offered the commission.  I was going to be offered the commission for doing the work in the interior— or the exterior of the building.  Another artist was asked to do the work on the exterior of the building.  When I walked in the CIA, and I walked into their new building, and I walked into their old building, I realized all their walls were painted that same institutional green we’re all so familiar [unintelligible] with— government architecture in general, and to me was very, you know, it’s a very [unintelligible] difficult environment.  And that was one of the reasons I decided to take the commission on, was because the agency was a vast organization.  It’s more or less a university campus.  There’re very few people at the very top of the agency who know exactly what’s going on.  okay?  And even at the very top of the agency then, and perhaps now, there’s sort of two camps, politically two camps.  Maybe ethically two camps or whatever, but that’s the way the agency was divided then.  And so, you’re dealing with a very wide audience, and I would hate not to do a project for the agency and somehow penalize them for some work that they did.  And so I decided— I chose to do the commission.  An artist was chosen to do the other work on the inside of the building and turned it down, and the commission was withdrawn, and so I’m happy I did the commission, and I’m hoping I made some difference, and—

But this piece is only one in three pieces at the CIA.  There’s a large piece at the entrance when you walk into the new building that you pass through.  There are large stone outcroppings.  Then there’s the Kryptos sculpture, and then there’s another pool of water, sort of a contemplative pool with coy in it.  Things like this— a contemplative space where you might contemplate the day's events.  So it’s three separate things.  I tried to put as much into the project as I possibly could, lost my… [technical difficulty with audio] "battery’s dead!  Well I got a little bit."  …I tried to put as much in— pack as much stuff in there as possible.  In the codes are very simple, in the piece you walk through from the outside, then they get infinitely more complex as you get into the inner sanctum.  And the way I wrote the codes, the codes also— they get progressively harder the further you get along.  So k4 is geometrically harder than k1 through three to crack.

[unintelligible audience questions]

[Sanborn] Well, I , yeah,

[audience continues]

[Sanborn] Yeah, I, there is been a great— there has actually, at the agency, been a great— there’ve been several requests for some sort of object, that forms the reason why I decided to do this multiple.  There has been many requests of the CIA store, "Is there anything associated with Kryptos we might be able to buy?"  So there is— there is, when I first built the project at the agency, when I first started working out there, the vast majority of people that were walking around the piece to go into the main building derided what I was doing.  And then I wrote an open letter to the agency explaining exactly what I was doing to try to clear up the misconceptions and things like that.  And various politicos, I guess [unintelligible] Buchanan referred to it as a pile of dinosaur feces.  So I wanted to be sure that I had used a copperlite in my project, and I had.  And so I wrote an open letter, and after that a huge number of people came up very supportive of what I was doing.  And that, that made me feel very good, but it still demonstrated that there is still opposing forces in any very large organization, and it’s certainly true at the agency.  Actually the idea in large measure of putting— having a public art project at the agency was William Webster’s idea.  And so he was sort of the brainchild of that, and he’s the one that gave the talk and the dedication ceremony.  A very sensitively-done, description of the piece and how I went about it, and the fact that they enjoyed having it there.  And I— it’s sort of like, you know, you build a piece for somebody, you hope that you do justice to it for years afterwards in your deeds and actions.  And I’m sure there’re things in my Atomic Time show which is also about secrecy and technology, which is a little tough for a lot of people in government to handle, but so far I’ve been tolerated, and that’s, I think is the most I could ever hope for out there.  I think it’s great.

[unintelligible audience question]

[Sanborn] Request to where else people can see my work.  As I mentioned, the Convention Center.  The new Convention Center just inside the main entrance there are two very large cylindrical pieces.  There’s another piece in Arlington near Arlington Boulevard.  And not too far from the— where the whole [unintelligible] is in Arlington.   There is a, what else do we do around here?  Oh yeah, there’s a very big project I did years ago of [unintelligible] in Silver Springs.  It’s a large recreation of the Atlantic coast line with waves that crash against the coast line.  I believe it’s still in operation.  I built that about ten or twelve years ago.  Oh yes, my gallery in town is my Numark Gallery.  Cheryl Numark— she represents me here in Washington if there are any inquiries about purchase of things.  And—  Anyone else?

[unintelligible audience question]

[Sanborn] This piece— most of my public projects, to tell you the truth, takes about two years.  I’ve been able to speed up the project because of the robotic cutting, but this took two and a half years just to make.  It took a year before that to conceive of, and it took about six months or eight months to install, so altogether it was almost three and a half, four years.

[unintelligible audience question]

[Sanborn] Ahhh yes, well I don’t know.  The question was, is there a commission that I dream of doing— would love to have?  To tell you the truth,

[unintelligible audience interjection]

[Sanborn] Yeah, really.  No.  Dream commissions.  I think the dream occurs in really magical commissions I do for peop— for organizations— for universities who are enlightened.  And basically public art commissions for an artist are exercises in compromise, and there are a lot of artists who don’t do public artwork commission, because the compromises are too extreme.  I try to compromise as little as possible, which means I try to choose— I’m very selective about which commissions I choose to do now, because I really do want "carte blanch."  And I want the piece to be cared for after its made, and to be appreciated, you know, while its there by the people I’ve done it for.  And those are the things that are most important to me.  So to me, the dream commission would be from anybody who will fulfill those criteria by deciding to do it.  But I do enjoy university commissions.  Most of the work does involve text.   A lot of it involves international language text and native American texts.  So I generally now work with a lot of texts.  The texts are usually in languages other than English.  Again it serves the leftover from the encoded texts pieces where you don’t get the idea right of the bat.  You get it later, and I like the idea that public art pieces requiring a collaboration between people of different cultures to understand.  So lets say I just finished one for the university of Houston, which is— we’ll see if it gets through the hurricane— and that piece is like in nine different languages, and so if someone went up to the piece to try to figure out what it said, it would require nine different cultures sitting around together trying to understand it.  To me that was very exciting, and that’s one of the reasons I work that way.  Because it creates an interactive cultural thing, and that was important to me.

[unintelligible audience question]

Hermann Zapf
[Sanborn] Well there are certain languages, requires certain fonts, okay?  The idea— the question was do I use different typography fonts in the work, and basically my fonts are— the problem is that each font I use has to be stencilized, which isn’t always the case with all kinds of fonts.  My fondness for fonts I think came to me when my parents— my father used to be a director of exhibitions for the library of congress, and we had a fella named Hermann Zapf stay at our home.  And  Hermann Zapf is probably one of the most famous typography designers in the world.  And these are very small alphabets for my parents [unintelligible].  It still is the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen, just for the very simple [unintelligible], and so I love the typography.  I used Greek.  I used classical Greek, classical Latin, Arabic Chinese, and a lot of other texts whose typeface is— and the shapes and the characters are very fascinating to me and beautiful in and of themselves.  And so since I have to stencilize every alphabet, to have to stencilize an alphabet in Chinese, you only want to use one typeface.  So I am limited that way, just to a number of typefaces in what I use.

[unintelligible audience question]

[Sanborn] Yeah, I might have mentioned earlier that one of my first courses of study was in archeology, and during that discourse of studies I did some excavations on Indian sites.  Did some excavations on early American and some projects in England, and I became fascinated with, at least, I guess that sort of began, I did a courthouse— I did a project for a courthouse in Greenville, Maryland— the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Greenville.  I found out there are [unintelligible] record there on that site previous to when the building was built about nine thousand years ago.  It was occupied by Native Americans who used it as a mine for projectile points and arrow heads and all sorts of stone tools.  I thought it was irony that they were putting a federal courthouse on top of a weapons— one of the earliest weapons caches in the world.  I thought it was a wonderful thing.  So I didn’t find any arrowheads during the course of my operation, and I more or less covered the entire side of the building and the landscape.  So I went and had made five thousand arrow heads, and I seeded the ground with them.  So people can walk through there today to find arrow heads and take them to the local historical society and drive them insane.  They’re all new!  That’s what began the whole Native American text thing.  [unintelligible]  I haven’t done any in Navajo yet, but I’m sure maybe someday I will.

[audience applause]