When Jim Sanborn was commissioned to create a sculpture at CIA headquarters, he wanted to do something that to spoke to its world of spies and secret codes.
The result was a 10-foot-tall, S-shaped copper screen called “Kryptos” that resembles a piece of paper coming out of a fax machine. One side features a series of staggered alphabets that are key for decoding the four encrypted messages on the other side. The paragraphs, he said, were “designed to unravel like a ball of string” or “nesting Russian dolls” and get increasingly difficult.
