Jim Sanborn, William
Webster, Ed Scheidt, and other misc.
quotes that I find intriguing:
*Yellow text = my
input.
Green text= the real
interesting stuff.
********************************************************************
Jim
Sanborn:
"It's about
the thrill of discovery,"
"I was profoundly affected by the CIA environment. I worked
there
for two and a half years, and the atmosphere never ceased to
amaze
me: the sense of always being watched, of never being alone, and
of constantly wondering about how I would feel to be a part of
that
community. After a while I began to notice this paper pulp, maybe
forty or fifty tons of documents, leaving the Agency day after
day
after day, like a waterfall, flowing continuously. It was
amazing,
the quantity of material that exited that place. And I knew that
these were the
remains of secret documents, and in some ways there
were similarities between this flow of paper and materials I had
used before. It was like finding a fossil and cracking open the
rock to discover what is inside. Imagine listening into a secret
conversation, one that you can hear but can't understand. It is
like peering though a window: it's voyeuristic. That kind of gaze
produces a certain kind of gratification that is obviously
dangerous, but also magical to me. That immediate gratification
that comes from being an interloper who discovers a deep secret,
that is what this exhibition is all about."
"Once the plate is deciphered I'm not convinced the true
meaning
will be clear even then. There's another deeper mystery. "
"Sure
sombeody will figure it out eventually and then personalities
will change, you know. Ten years will go by, 15 years will go by
and
they'll forget what it says again. "
******************************************************************************
Ed
Scheidt:
"I could use
methods to encrypt it that had a historic basis--that
didn't compromise any current methods" (of cryptography used
by the government).
"Wanted to make something that could eventually be
deciphered or
extracted, rather than something that will never be done,
ever.."
"I saved the best for last," Scheidt said with
satisfaction,
"No clues, sorry."
********************************************************************
William
Webster: (WW?)
"[Kryptos]
Speaks to a sense of place"
"You have captured much of what this agency is about."
********************************************************************
The
following are excerpts from Elonka's posts to the Kryptos groups.
Elonka:
| According to Ed: He did more than simply teach Sanborn various encryption systems, but did the actual encryption and design of the Kryptos code. | |
| Regarding
Kryptos, he talked about how we needed to recover the keys, and that the keys were concealed at the sculpture. He got very vague whenever I asked him whether we have sufficient information already to deduce the key for part 4 or whether there's something else that someone on-site has to be able to see or manipulate in some way. |
|
| I asked him
if it would be fair to tell sssomeone that was working on
part 4 that they'd have to look at not just the letters, but also pictures of Kryptos and its surroundings." He gave my question extremely careful thought for a moment or two, but then said only, "I'll have to leave that open." |
|
| He made a
point of saying that he used too be an op, that part 4 is
designed to be solved in a straightforward manner with
pencil and paper, and that he did things to
"disguise the English" in part 4, so that it
couldn't be solved in the frequency analysis ways that
were used for parts 1-3. *With pencil and paper by someone who works for the CIA or military? or by any amateur cryptographer? |
|
| He also said that parts 1-3 had been solved without recovering the key first. | |
| He said he built in some dead-ends. | |
| He said that
part was designed to be solved with multiple keys - a code where different keys could be given to different people, but they'd still be able to solve it (which I believe explains why we've come up with so many different ways of solving part 3). |
|
| He talked
about how the code was designed so that someone could come along 15 years later, without remembering what the key was, and still be able to figure it out because of clues that were there. |
|
| And, I'm not
sure what this meant exactly, but he talked about how it was a code that could be solved without giving away who'd solved it. |
|
| "but
nearly every one of them volunteered that, based on what
they knew of the individual involved with the design, they said that they felt sure that the placement of the rocks and wood would be important." |
|
| "There's
a patio/backyard, and then farther back past that there's
a separate glass-walled building which is his studio.
Sanborn showed me how he had tiny miniatures of his
sculptures made. He sends an image to a company in
California, which for something the size of Kryptos would
produce a small flexible screen maybe 6 inches by 3
inches and includes all of the letters. You can then bend
the screen into different shapes, or roll it into a
cylinder with a penlight inside of it, so you could see
how the letters were projected onto a wall. Once he'd
decided on what shape it should be in, he would send the
order to the waterjet plant in Minneapolis (Gary, you
were right) and they'd do the actual cutting." *I'd like to get a hold of one of those little screens and do some tests with it, (plus it'd be a novelty to have).If anyone has info on the company in California, lemme know. |
|
| "After dinner, we went to his favorite hangout, a nearby coffeehouse called "Java Coffee" that he's been going to pretty much daily for 20 years. At the coffeeshop, I I pulled out my laptop computer and ran through the Kryptos presentation for him (you can see these slides at http://www.elonka.com/kryptos/ppt)" | |
| - Sanborn seemed somewhat unaware of just how big a deal Kryptos has become. He was kind of bemused by how it's been over 10 years, and still has captured the public imagination. | |
| He commented how it was odd that "no one has recovered the original matrix". He kept using that word "matrix"quite a bit, such as to say "matrix system". Evidently there's something important about re-creating the exact system that he used for encrypting the messages, and he has never seen anyone do that yet (and didn't see it anywhere on my slides). | |
| When he saw my method for solving part 3, with the clean diagonals, he nodded and said that it must be "a by-product of the original matrix system". | |
| Similar to
how Scheidt reacted, I saw Sanborn light up when I talked about how the extra "L" on the tableau side now means that we have the same number of characters on both the cipher-alphabet and tableau sides. Neither Scheidt nor Sanborn *said* anything when I talked about that, but I definitely noticed both of them reacting, like sitting up or forward a little more, nodding like this was something that they knew and were glad that someone had noticed. |
|
| When I showed the pictures of the out off alignment letters, Sanborn made a point of pointing to them and specifically asking if anything else has been figured out about them. He said, "They're important." | |
| When I asked about the misspellings and asked if they were accidental or deliberate, Sanborn said that they were deliberate, but it was less important *what* they were. He said, and I quote: "it's more the orientation of those letters that's useful there." Later on in the evening he repeated that point, saying it was the "positioning" that was important. | |
| Sanborn was
adamant that Scheidt did *not* do the encryption. He said that Scheidt
did teach him various systems "going back to
Caesar", and that Sanborn used "several"
of them, but that the actual encryption was done by
Sanborn, by himself, during the time that he was driving
the petrified tree from the southwestern U.S. back to the
DC area. Sanborn said that he and Scheidt had agreed to
keep it "compartmentalized" like that. Sanborn insisted that
when it came to the encryption, he said (referring to
himself) that it was "entirely me." *I see some conflicting information here, anyone else? Did Sanborn do the encryption, or did Ed? |
|
| Sanborn said
that no one else beta-testedd the code -- not even
Scheidt. When I commented that first-time code creators often make errors that leave a code unsolvable, he said that he was certain that he did it right. He said though he has never gone back to decrypt it, because that keeps it more secure. |
|
| Getting back
to Kryptos, Sanborn commented that he was surprised that
no one had tried recovering the original matrix and running it through all possible "shifts". |
|
| When I showed him the number key for thee column transposition, he nodded as though he already recognized it. | |
| Regarding
the latitude/longitude coordinnnaates, he said the USGS marker that he used for a benchmark was at a point which corresponds with the marker that David Wilson found, about 400' northwest of the sculpture. |
|
| In terms of where the Kryptos lat/long cccooordinates point to, I showed him the spot that Chris/Xenon found, and Sanborn nodded and said that that looked "pretty close". But then he said it could be one of two locations. Either Xenon's spot, or at one other possible place, and he then pointed at a spot out in the front entrance area! The additional spot he pointed to was somewhere several yards south of where the compass rose is, but it didn't look like he was pointing at anything in particular. | |
| After pointing out the two possible placccees that the lat/long could point to, he made the interesting comment, "Did you know that each night after we worked, the CIA employees would come out and use powerful neutron x-rays to examine everything we did, everything a contractor might have touched?" | |
| Regarding
the other front entrance pieces, he said he'd never been allowed to take pictures of those pieces himself, so he was very intrigued to see Gillogly's pictures. Sanborn also said that the front entrance pieces were supposed to parallel something in the courtyard, but then when I showed him the "bird's eye" pics, he saw that they didn't, which surprised him and he seemed a bit disappointed. |
|
| He said that
the site of the Kryptos sculpture was chosen because
there had been a tree and associated "tree grate" there, so there was already an 8-foot diameter hole which he could use for the pool. He also said that originally there had been a forest on that location, and that the Agency had to cut the trees down at night so that the Agency employees wouldn't get upset. |
|
| He said that
Webster had definitely been one of the key individuals in
getting the art there, because he wanted to give the Agency a "softer" image. Sanborn had the impression that some of the other higher-ups at the Agency had tried to sabotage the project because of enmity with Webster. For example, an entire truckload of the granite that Sanborn had shipped in, just "disappeared" one day. Many thousands of pounds of granite (and the truck) just vanished without a trace and were never found. Sanborn said more granite had to be re-purchased for him. |
|
| He said he
didn't design the entire Courttyard area -- just the
pieces by the entrance, the green semicircular park area and the Kryptos sculpture. As an interesting aside, he said that when he put in the duck pond and filled it with water, within two hours there were ducks in it! *I did research on this comment, about the migration habits of ducks around the time Kryptos was installed (Dedicated on November 3, 1990), and this isn't anything unusual. I was under the false assumption that most ducks migrate south by November. |
|
| I asked about the stairstep pattern at thhe top of the petrified tree, but he said that it didn't mean anything, that it was just, "that's the way it broke." | |
| I
specifically asked him if the question mark at the end of
part 3 was part of section 3 or section 4, but he declined to answer. |
|
| He said he didn't know when the NSA had cccome up with their solution, but that he had never heard of anyone solving part 4. | |
| I asked him
if the "desparatly" typo was deliberate or
accidental, and he declined to answer. |
|
| I brought up John Wilson's speculation aaabbout the 16 steps and "inserted candle", but he didn't react. | |
| When I brought up how we'd been unable to find any book or poem that used the wording in the Part 1 sentence, he said that part 1 of Kryptos is an original sentence, written by him, with "carefully-chosen wording". | |
| He said part
2 was deliberately written to sound like "an interrupted radio transmission", similar to the morse code messages. *So isn't it very possible that a radio transmission would be encoded with jargon? |
|
| He said that "Kryptos wasn't cracked the reverse of the way that I did it." | |
| That's most of what I can remember. In
terms of what my own speculations are at this point, I'm
thinking of the wheels on a combination bicycle lock, and
wondering if the shifted letters might mean that letters
need to be shifted up or down in part 4. For example,
dYAhR might mean that in each grouping of five letters
(and many codes are written in groups of 5), that the 2nd
3rd and 5th letters need to be rotated/shifted up (or
down) a notch. I'm also remembering that when I pointed out
the trailing "KR" "YP" and
"TOS" on the part 4 lines, that I got *some*
kind of reaction, but I couldn't tell whether it was an
"Ah, you noticed that", or "Heh, she's
seeing things" smirk. But if we could "spin the
wheels" of the bicycle lock to get the word
"Kryptos" to line up somehow ... |
|
Tuesday afternoon I spent many hours in the bowels of the GSA building. They have extensive files on four Sanborn pieces, including the Kryptos sculpture, since they're the office that commissioned it. I'd originally been planning to get a copy of everything they had, but it was just too much information. The Kryptos file alone was maybe 4 inches thick, along with dozens of slide images and articles. So I went through and copied anything that I didn't have that looked like it might be remotely applicable, such as correspondence from Sanborn. Much of it was unrelated bureaucraticness, such as correspondence with each of the members of the selection committee, lots of legalese in the contracts, etc. A couple gems in the pile though were pictures of what the site looked like before and during construction, along with a couple photos of Kryptos from angles we haven't seen before, copies of a couple articles which I hadn't yet seen, and a copy of the "maintenance" manual that Sanborn wrote for the CIA staff in terms of the upkeep of the sculpture. |
|
| E: Something that I've
been curious about, was those spelling errors on Kryptos, like
"Iqlusion" and "Undergruund." Were
those deliberate, or were they human error? J: Those were deliberate. But it's not so much what they are -- it's more the orientation of those letters that's useful there. *Why
did Sanborn offer this information but decline
to tell Elonka whether or not the spelling errors in
"DESPARATLY" were intentional? Then later on
in the evening, I think when I was showing him my slides |
|
| This is an extract from a Sanborn
interview in the "Atomic Time" book which was
released as part of Sanborn's new gallery show. Interviewer: Could you describe the process of working on Kryptos (1988-1990), 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, D.C., 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 somewhow 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 document they are working on at any given time. Interviewer: 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 I 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. Interviewer: 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 notnecessarily 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 the 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 the Medusa's gaze, represented by these bright texts, fell over one's body as one walked through the room. There was a petrifiedtree 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. Interviewer: Where did these texts come from? Sanborn: The text I chose was directly obtained 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 ofembassies throughout the world and in Washington there are rooms that are coveredwith copper screen, and they are used for encoding and decoding incoming and outgoing messages. The code room that I used in the Corcoran intallation 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. |
|
| In a message dated 11/21/2003 11:39:44
AM Central Standard Time, [email protected] writes:
Dear Agency Employees: I am writing this letter to give you an idea of what I am up to at the Agency, and to explain those big tilted slabs of stone. The stonework in the courtyard and at the entrance to the new building serves two functions: First, it creates a natural framework for the project as a whole and is part of a landscaping scheme designed to recall the natural stone outcroppings that existed on this site before the Agency, and that will endure as do mountains. Second, the tilted strata tell a story like pages of a document. Over the next several months, a flat copper sheet through which letters and symbols are cut will be inserted between these stone "pages." This code, which includes certain ancient ciphers, begins as International Morse and increases in complexity as you move through the piece at the entrance and into the courtyard. Its placement in a geologic context reinforces the text's "hiddenness" as if it were a fossil or an image frozen in time. An installation in the courtyard further explores this theme. On the paved surface, supported by a petrified tree, will stand a curved, vertical copper plate. Approximately 2000 letters of the alphabet are cut through this plate (a process which requires four months of work). The left side of the plate is a table for deciphering and enciphering code, developed by Blaise de Vigenere in 1570. The right side is a text that can be partly deciphered by using the table and partly by using a potentially challenging encoding system. The text, written in collaboration with a prominent fiction writer, is revealed only after the code is deciphered. My choice of materials, like code, conveys meaning. At the entrance a lodestone (a rock naturally magnetized by lighting [sic]) refers to ancient navigational compasses. The petrified tree recalls the trees that once stood on this site and that were the source of materials on which written language has been recorded. The copper, perforated by text, represents this "paper." I also use another symbol; water. In a small pool on the plaza, partly surrounded by the copper plate, water will be turbulent and provocative, constantly agitated into standing waves. In the other pool, located among trees in the courtyard and between two massive outcroppings, water will be calm, reflective, contemplative. Other materials around the site -- largestones, ornamental grasses, and small trees -- are designed to make thenatural features surrounding the Agency more visually interesting and thought provoking. My work at Langley is approximately two thirds complete. If you see me or my apprentices working, please don't heistate to ask questions about the work. Sincerely, (signed) Jim Sanborn |
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