] James Sanborn n'en était pas à son coup d'essai, puisqu'il avait
] créé en 1990 une sculpture pour l'entrée du bâtiment principal de
] la CIA. Intitulée "Kryptos", cette oeuvre attend toujours d'être
] entièrement décryptée.

A Kryptos page that I ran across, which is all in French, which brings the number of different languages writing about Kryptos & the Cyrillic Projector to three (the other language is Russian).

I also got a kick out of the artwork at the top of this page, which is in an old Civil War cipher. I used to write messages in that cipher on my desk in high school math class. The real trip was when someone wrote back! :)

Les sculptures de James Sanborn

This is the website of "MetaCortex", the company that Neo worked for in the Matrix. There's a lot of info here, and evidently multiple puzzles waiting to be solved. It's one of those "Alternate Reality Games", like Majestic. I'm way too busy with Kryptos & Cyrillic Projector stuff at the moment to dig into it, but it looks like fun, so I wanted to at least meme it.

More info is here:
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~mlpatter/matrix/

Enjoy,

Elonka :)

Matrix Puzzle - MetaCortex Headquarters

I just posted a huge updated version of one section of my Kryptos site this evening, focusing on all of sculptor Jim Sanborn's work. I've got info on over 100 different pieces of artwork, ranging over nearly 30 years of his career (so far).

My efforts have been paying off, too, such as with the KGB document that was found in the Smithsonian archives, plus learning about extra "Covert Operations fragments" tucked into private collections and galleries here and there, and also some intriguing things I've learned about three engraved compasses in three different installations of Sanborn's from around the DC area (one of which is Kryptos) that are all pointing in distinctly non-north directions (hmm, maybe they triangulate on something?).

He's also got a new show opening in November called "Atomic Time - Pure Science and Seduction" about the origin of the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Supposedly it's going to be quite controversial, as some of it will cover the related ethical dilemmas, and will be skating the edge of what is and isn't allowed to be revealed in terms of classified information. I've obtained some of the advance press images of the as-yet-unopened show, and you can see those as well at the new Sanborn page by clicking on the link below.

I'd also like to ask for help on something, regarding the Kryptos research. Kryptos is actually a multi-piece set, with different parts scattered around CIA Headquarters, and I've learned that there's a brief glimpse of a couple of them in a Will Smith movie, "Enemy of the State", during an overhead shot of CIA Headquarters at one point. Does anyone reading this happen to know where I could get a still of that scene?

Thanks much,

Elonka :)

Photographer/Artist James Sanborn

] Most of the documents presented in this archive were
] discovered and secured by a known soviet dissident,
] Vladimir Bukovsky (Cambridge, England) back in Russia
] in 1992.

One of the other members of my Kryptos brainstorming group discovered this webpage. It has PDFs of several KGB documents about dissident Sakharov, including a PDF of the same document that I found in the Sanborn folders of the Smithsonian Archive!

It's not clear whether my copy was obtained from the same dissident who got these copies, or whether they were two copies made on different days by two different people. But the archive is awesome, because it shows several different KGB documents, in their entirety, and in sequence. There are also other sections of the site which cover documents on other topics. If you want to see more KGB stuff, this is the place to go!

More background info on my Kryptos group, the KGB document that I found, and the Cyrillic Projector's code, are here:
http://www.elonka.com/kryptos/cyrillic.html

Elonka :)

More KGB documents about Sakharov

Currently one of the angles that we're looking at on Kryptos, is palindromes. This is because of an unusually large number of doubled letters both in the ciphertext and involved in deliberate misspellings of other words (underground : undergruund, illusion : iqlusion), and because there are some other related pieces by Sanborn that involve Morse code palindromes (such as a line with some leading dots and the word "invisible").

e e e e e e invisible:
. . . . . . .. -. ...- .. ... .. -... .-.. .

reverse the line: . ..-. ...- .. ... .. -... .- .. . . . . . .

Keep the spacing the same, and it's close but not intelligible: "efvisibai e e e e e e ". But change the spacing, and it comes back to the word "e invisible e e e e e":

. .. -. ...- .. ... .. -... .-.. . . . . . .

Palindrome Collection

(from http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid7273/ )

] Looks like if I want an online double-key Vigenere decoder,
] I'm going to have to write one... Stay tuned.

Okay, I wrote a Vigenere table-builder (in Flash MX Actionscript) that'll handle English and Cyrillic alphabets. I also included the keys needed to build the tables that appear on the Kryptos and Cyrillic Projector sculptures, along with the keys to solve parts 1 and 2 of the Kryptos code.

The utility *doesn't* do automatic encoding/decoding (yet), but will eventually. In the meantime, it's useful (IMHO) as a timesaver to build the tables, or a teaching device to understand how the tables are put together.

Vigenere Table Builder

] Monday - June 23 - 2003 - TIME Magazine, March 18, 1991.
] "Secrecy at CIA headquarters extends all the way to
] the courtyard. Kryptos, a granite-and-copper sculpture by
] Washington artist Jim Sanborn, was quietly installed last
] November near a new building on the agency's
] grounds. Taxpayers financed the $250,000 work, but that
] does not guarantee public access. Sanborn's
] sculpture features a 2,000-character encoded message that
] is believed to have been penned by a well-known writer
] whose name has not been disclosed. Besides the artist and
] the author, only CIA director William Webster knows what
] the top-secret phrase says." True no longer! 3 of 4
] parts solved. Visit The First Lady of Online Games for
] more.

Game Designer God Cliff Johnson blogged me! (I'm walking on cloud 9)

Cliff Johnson's Blog on Kryptos

This is an online javascript Vigenere utility. Alas, it can't be used for something like Kryptos, because this utility only allows single key, and Kryptos is double-key. Still though, it's useful for single-key Vigenere.

Looks like if I want an online double-key Vigenere decoder, I'm going to have to write one... Stay tuned. :)

Vigenere Encoder/Decoder

I've been having fun tracking the hits to my steganography (elonka.com/steganography) and Kryptos (elonka.com/kryptos) pages on Sitemeter. And I've especially been getting a kick out of seeing links to my site from search engines in other languages such as French, German, Italian, and Polish. Today, I got a link from a Google search engine which looks like it's in Hebrew. I got a smile out of it for many reasons: The international nature of it, the interesting font, and if you click on the link, you'll see that Google even went to the trouble of right-justifying their listing, so it lines up on the right side instead of the left!

Israeli Google

Adam's Spinning Top is the second sculpture in the plaza, created from bronze with perforated text in English. The artist chose text from the writings of Adam Smith, an economic theorist and John Maynard Keynes, a 20-century theorist for the sculpture. The artwork stands as a metaphor for the importance of a healthy economy and an invigorated mind.

During the current economic crisis, I am often reminded of some of the other sculptures by James Sanborn (Kryptos creator), such as the multiple sculptures entitled "Adam Smith's Spinning Top". I see the economy spinning and moving along. The faster the movement, the more stable the top, and the stronger the economy. The movement is caused by everyone: Businesses, banks, government, individuals buying and selling. With the economy moving along at a good clip, everyone buying and selling, things are good. But right now, people are hunkering down, and not buying and selling. People are scared, are more likely to save than spend, and the top is slowing down more and more. Which affects everyone, as the economy weakens. The money to get it moving again is there, but people are reluctant to help push it along, because they're more concerned for their own finances, which, ironically, makes their own finances worse.

Ideas are needed to get the top moving again, and spinning at a healthy rate. Which means people need to be confident enough to spend some money. For each dollar spent, that dollar keeps moving, and affects multiple other people. I may go to a restaurant and enjoy a nice meal of sushi. The money I spend goes to the waitress, and the restaurant owner. They send the money along to their food suppliers. The waitress spends the money on clothes for her kids. The food suppliers spend the money going to a movie. The theater pays salaries to its own employees. Those employees may logon to the internet to play a subscription game, and that money comes back to me, so I can keep going out to sushi. ;) But the money's gotta flow, or everyone suffers.

Elonka

Artworks for State Buildings