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I want to thank TNG for the opportunity to do this. And I do have to say that maybe I'm sort of the anchor of the program to bring maybe everybody more or less down to reality. I mean, not virtual reality, real reality. There is nothing very virtual about what I do. I was fortunate when I was raised, my father was a director of a museum specifically the Library of Congress. When I was to do my term papers and high school papers, the real Dead Sea Scrolls were sitting on my father's desk. And so I could actually, you don't say that now, pick them up and look at them and study them and write a paper about it when I was in high school. That's a unique situation. But I was raised in a family that did research. So my mother did photographic research. It was anathema to me. I didn't want to be involved in it, but lo and behold, here I am doing work, which is largely research based.
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I work with science and technology. More specifically that moment in time where a pure science turns into a technology. And at that moment in time, technology can certainly take several forms. It can become a Jekyll and Hyde. It can do great things. It can do diabolical things, but that's that moment in time that I work with the most. The first images I'll show you to start in about 1998, where I was using scientific objects. I include archeology in the sciences and cryptography, in the sciences, and various other things, which are often in the periphery, but nonetheless are considered sciences. This was a mummy that I used a real Egyptian mummy in an installation in a museum environment in the United States. Mummies traditionally are in cases. They're not accessible. You can't walk up to a mummy. So what I did with this, mummy is I had it in a gallery and the mummy was just right there at eye level.
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And you could walk up to it like you're on an embalming table. And so, to keep people away from it, they are very, very fine, almost invisible monofilament lines in front of it. So if you get too close, you feel like you're hitting a spiderweb, sorta like the Howard Carter situation, you know, when he's covering King Tut's tomb. But it gives you that sort of, you know, the, the hair on the back of your neck stands up kind of situation. So in addition to the mummies, I chose lodestones. I'm not sure you're familiar with lodestone. Lodestone is that naturally magnetic stone. This is a mountain top in Utah, in the United States. This rock right here is hit by lightning hundreds of thousands of times. And it’s been hit billions of times during millennia because it's on the peak of the mountain and it's a solid mountain of iron. Lodestones were sacred to the Chinese, Chinese geomancers could make a spoon out of lodestone and they could, because it's magnetised, they could spin it on a, on a table and then choose the direct, choose what they thought the emperor should be doing at any given time.
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And so, because they knew where the spoon would stop, the emperor didn’t. So it was a big advantage. So anyway, so I chose to do a whole series of work with lodestones back in the 1980s. This was just one piece where we have the lodestone sitting here right here, and we have a lightning strike, could even lodestone. So, you know, hit me over the head, but this is what, how the lodestones achieve their power. So basically this is constructed by what a tiny pieces of stone are slid into this crack. And there's a single light source. And the single light source makes the lightning bolt that hits the lodestone. It's a tableau. This is another tableau that I did in a museum in New York. And these are small lodestones right here, very small ones, and compass needles. So in each of these compass needles, this is port is suspended by a single monofilament line.
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So all the lodestones all compasses on this side. Each one is controlled by the lodestone. So it points this way and all the ones over here are controlled by the Earth's magnetic field. So it gave you a very realistic, you know, this visual representation of an invisible force, right? So invisible forces was one of the things that I've always loved to work with now from lodestones to uranium, seems like a logical jump to me. So that's sort of where the work ended up more recently, but lodestones were then, but the problem was that this was nice and stable until the elevator went up and down in the wall behind it. And everything kind of like got wonky and strange. This is another piece I did at the Hirshhorn museum in Washington, again, sorry, again, suspended lodestones here and compass needles that have the front edge wrinkled and polished so that when the theatrical lighting came down, it reflected the lightning bolt.
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And so these little lightning bolts waver on the wall is if the lightning strikes the lodestone and creates the power, this is a, now I didn't say I didn't work with pseudoscience. This is a dowser, right? And I don't know what you'd call them in German, but he uses dowsing rods to find water. And various other things even rings that have been lost and things like this. This is a very famous dowser in the United States, and he has dowsing rods here, dowsing rods here. And this is his dowsing. Khaki believes the cat can find water. He follows this cat around. That's just the reality. So in order to, in order to more or less, give you a tableau of what dowsing was like, I took, I took sticks, just regular sticks from trees and I bored tiny very thin holes and threaded in carbon steel rods that I magnetized.
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So basically this is a, well, it was broken off a storm. Then I have the dowsing rods, all suspended, and this whole piece is oriented North and South. So all the dowsing rods are pointing in a straight line and they just kind of waver around and stay there. And so they are directed toward a metaphor for water, which is fossilized seabed. And then the tree, the two trees are juxtaposed and they're sort of opposites. This is a petrified tree that I find in Utah, and I've used a lot of petrified trees. And then there is this a type of stone that is sort of this aquamarine color and represents water. So this was a tableau called All Things Turned To Stone. This is another piece in which I use museum specimens. These are all museum specimens from the Smithsonian Institution, and this is a fossilized sea bed inside this tank here, there is a pool of water that has a machine, has a plate, a rotating plate in the bottom of it that generates a whirlpool that ends up in this wall.
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So there's this constant whirlpool spinning. And I've always thought there's some sort of connection here with the vortices. I mean, you have, vortices in spiral nebula in the sky. Then you say, when you come down to earth, you have a water spout and that's spinning into the water. And then on the bottom of the ocean, you have Ammonites, which are all again, you know, circular in motion. And so there's some sort of continuum between spiral nebulae and Ammonites at the bottom of the ocean. I always found that to be a fascinating point. I recreated a section, an 80 foot section of the Maine coastline, in front of the museum for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, D C it's a museum for the, for the ocean. And this wave machine is a hydraulic uses air pressure to generate a wave in 32 inches of water, basically a Tempest in a teacup.
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If I had to have, if I had to use more than 32 inches of water, I had to have a lifeguard that would have been pretty, fairly hideous in an art installation. So basically this way rolls out from underneath, from underneath this piece has having have air force down the water, and it goes out in a wave, strikes the coastline, the waves can hit 12 feet high. They vary between six feet and 12 feet high. As they crash against the coastline. You can sit there and have lunch, close your eyes, and imagine you're at the ocean. So in front of the museum, this in Silver Spring, Maryland outside of Washington, DC, the wave height is controlled by modem at the Woods Hole Laboratory in Massachusetts. So that if there are six inches at Woods Hole, there is six inches in Silver Spring, 12 feet, 12 feet.
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So it's a, it's a, it's a direct relationship between the reality of what's going on outside at any given time. Then we come to this object here. This is the sculpture, Kryptos and Kryptos, for some reason, the government General Services Administration the CIA that based on my previous work with the sciences now, granted I was working with lodestones and invisible forces of nature, right? They just made this absurd quantum leap thinking. I could work with the invisible forces of mankind. And so I was awarded the commission to do this for the CIA. For those of you who don't know about this, this has become something of infamous on the internet. And, and as recently as 2010 after much prodding, I gave a clue out in 2010. And the clue to the part that is as this point, unsolved is starts with this question mark. And it goes around here and all the way around here, it has become one of the most famous unsolved codes of all time, from what I'm told. And so,
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When I released that clue, the clue is Berlin. So that's all I've given up. Give one clue every 10 years, I figure I'm 68 years old. I'm good for maybe one and a half. So that's all they're going to get. And they'll probably end up dying with me what it actually says. So that's all good, well and good because if you make an artwork and the artwork doesn't have something in it that will hold your attention more for more than five minutes, there's no reason to make the artwork. And this goes for painting sculpture or whatever it is. And so I didn't know that this was going to hold the attention for 20 plus years and become something of a cult thing on the internet, but lo and behold there, it was. So anyway, on Kryptos, there is a chart on this side designed in 1588 by a French diplomat, it's called Verney Aries, Tableau. The Verney Aries Tableau is able to crack this part and this part, okay. Not beyond here, but so far, these parts have been cracked.
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Okay. Now 
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I am what I like to refer to myself as an anathemath, which means I have, I am afraid of mathematics. I do not have math skills. I was taught, I was taught physics, but only baby physics. I was taught math in summer school because I didn't pass math in high school. So basically there are other ways to make codes rather than using algorithms, the bane of my existence. So I worked with a cryptographer from the CIA and who was retired many years before, and who just loved the idea of potentially stumping, the CIA and the NSA in particular, since they're kind of enemies. So they have to work together. And so we worked together. He basically gave me a history of encoded systems, and I was then able to take those systems and use them anyway I wanted, modify them,
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so he couldn't figure out what it said and then go about making my sculpture. So basically I use something very simple as this, which are matrix codes for the parts that had been deciphered already. I'm going to, I'm not going to give you the clue to the final section, but this shows you more or less the way I did it. So basically you have your plain text up here. It says between subtle shading and the absence of light, lies the nuance of illusion. Okay. That's something that I wrote and it's, so when Kryptos is cracked, when the sections are cracked, you don't get something which is necessarily intelligible. I hope you get something that will go beyond that. I don't know where, I mean, it's up to you where it will take you. Maybe it will take you to solving the next part of Kryptos.
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I don't know, but it's retained its mystery to date. So this part has been cracked and you can see the keyword is inserted below the plain text. Palimpsest as I'm sure you all know what a palimpsest is, and that, that is inserted that way you use Vernie Aries tableau by taking like the B in the first line and running over, like in a mileage chart along the top of Vernie Aries tableau, and then you take the, the, the E down at the bottom and go across until you hit the letter that you want, just like the distance from Munich to Paris, right? You've got the, you've got the E, so that you take that E and you put that E into a chart that goes a different direction. You flip the chart over and turned it upside down, and then you start writing down those lists that way you turn it again, or you turn it backwards and shine a light on it, but whatever it takes, that's what you do. On this, on this one, in particular, on this coding chart, these coding charts were made by me, obviously by hand, nothing digital involved here.
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This is 1988, before all of us had most machines and pass cards. And all of those things and pass codes. And coding was only thought about a lot, but not necessarily in everyone's life. And so Kryptos ran along on this parallel track with code. So it was interesting though, that there was one sentence here and it was transmitted underground. … Does anyone know about that? Does Langley know about that? Right. So that's an interesting sentence. It's again, another coding chart you can see abscissa and it became important. This is you take that chart and you flip it this way, and it turns into this chart so that the final letter in a coding system might be, might be the W up there. And so that would be the last word before the part that hasn't been cracked yet.
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So when I made that Kryptos piece, we didn't have water jet cutting. We didn't have robotic water jet cutting. So this was all cut with, with 24 assistants, nine Bosch jigsaws, 900 saw blades in two and a half years of cutting is what it took to cut out Kryptos. So it was a significant, every letter had to be hand drilled. Every letter had to be hand cut, nothing virtual about this. This was serious hard work, and that's the only way it could be cut out at the time. Now, the thing about it is this is the way it's cut today. So what took me two and a half years, I have cut routinely now in 24 hours by this kind of machine using high pressure water. This is a rather large boon to my existence, and I really appreciate it. So that's a significant event.
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Other things have happened to Kryptos. Most recently, it's like the Energizer bunny of artworks in that various things crop up on the internet or crop up in popular culture. Kryptos has been embraced by popular culture. Now we all probably know this author, Dan Brown. Right? So when we also know probably the term open source, right? Well, in this case, it's more like forced open source, right? So we have Dan Brown, and this is the cover of the Da Vinci Code. And right along here, you can see the coordinates and part of my code. There's a West Northwest, and there are GPS coordinates in that book cover there. And then down here, if you take a mirror and read it, what's in here, they're direct, they're drawn directly from the Kryptos sculpture. This is not a person I know; I've never met;
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no permission was given. It was just kind of borrowed against sort of a forced open source. And in this factoid, in the beginning of this book, which is a latest book called The Lost Symbol, not these, I only had to read because my lawyer required me to read them. I don't read these kinds of things, but nonetheless it says the document was locked in the safe and the director of CIA, the document is still there today. Its cryptic text includes reference to an ancient portal to underground, right? So all through his most, not his most recent book, but the one prior to that The Lost Symbol, there are references to Kryptos in the words, in, in, in the entire document, even to the extent where here we have the screen of Kryptos redacted, and only parts of it taken out and up here, it says in his book, it says, Oh, by omitting the vast majority of the texts, the server avoided copyright infringement about that right there on the page, that's using my Kryptos screen.
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So enough of the sour grapes business, but it's a, it's a lesson to everyone who, who thinks about every artist who creates something, you know, what's going to happen to it. Who's going to make $550 million off of part of their idea. You never know. And it's always potentially possible. In every office at CIA headquarters. Even today, there are these paper bags and there's a chute on the wall. And so at the end of the day, after you've written all of your, you know, nefarious activities, and you don't want anybody to see them, you stick them in a plastic bag, you put them down the chute and the chute goes down into a large hammer mill and the hammer mill grinds everything up. So at the end of the day, there's nothing left secret in your room. And so the hammer mill grinds it up in pieces.
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So I made a deal with the director of central intelligence that I would give him the code to Kryptos, if he gave me access to this paper pulp. The problem, the bigger the situation was that I, over the two years, it took me to install that piece at CIA headquarters. I noticed there was a large dumpster behind that there were three large dumpsters in a row and a loading dock and a large pipe coming out of the ceiling. And there was a constant waterfall of pulped documents coming out and filling up these dumpsters and they go away to a guarded landfill. I followed them one day, they went to a guarded landfill. So in a bold move, I said, if I'm going to do it, I might as well. I wanted to see if I could make art out of that stuff because it's, you know, it has really, it has, it's very ponderous conceptual meaning, right?
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I mean, you can't imagine what is in there. What kind of disinformation is in there? It's incendiary material. I found it as a fascinating material, just as a lodestone has magnetic power. This has an immense amount of conceptual power. So I wanted some of it. So I made this deal and I pulled my car up there before I made the deal. I wanted to find out if it works, I pulled my car in there, took some five gallon pails out, went up over the dumpster, put it all in the back of my car, drove out of CIA headquarters, fully expecting those big iron things to come up, you know, under the car to catch me on the way out. They didn't. I took it. I did make the deal. I took it. I rented a 30,000 square foot warehouse. I covered the floor with paper pulp, dried it out over a long period of time and then started using it to make artwork out of the first thing I made was this piece.
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It's called Kamigmalo. It has encoded text on the inside as if it were a chimney through which documents you know, were burned. And then the information came through. So you could only see the encoded text on the inside. Little bits of information are still in existence. The hammer mill doesn't get rid of all of it, right? So these little secret things there are playing. There are jets on the runway in Iraq. This is 1991. It was the first Iraq war. There were lots of satellite images of the desert and of runways and of city streets and of people's faces, which they thought had been destroyed but hadn't been. This is a KGB document that I got through connections with the library of Congress. These are brought out just around 1991 by KGB, former KGB officers who released these in order to get out of the country.
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And so I took these documents and then made a whole series of works over a fairly large period of time out of the paper pulp using kgb recently released documents about operations carried out against KGB, KGB operations carried out against the US and also in Arabic and in other languages. So this is the paper pulp. I took the paper pulp, put it down as in a damp state, suspended assistants over it while they pressed letters into the surface, built an oven around it, and then baked them. And the cracks formed just in the baking process so that they resembled Sumerian reliefs, which I was very fond of. And I liked the idea of the covert obsolescence, the obsolescence of the whole operations of covert activity. This is before of course, 9/11. So at the time things were kind of winding down. So this is a room in the basement of every embassy, whether it's us Russian or whoever embassy, it is, there are copper screen lined rooms to keep out radio waves and to keep electronic messages from leaving those rooms.
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And so I built several of these rooms and an installation, and they're all lined with Arabic and Cyrillic texts about KGB and CIA operations carried out during that time, or over a period of years. I had somebody come to the show and he said, I was the ambassador to X, X place. And he said, we had one of these in our basement. It was operated actually by the CIA. And so it's absolutely correct what, you've, what you've got there. And simultaneously I made a series of works. There were called Deceit Filters. Okay. So Ombah in Russian, I didn't say the Russian pronunciation, but the letters on there say deceit in Cyrillic. And it's as if in your mind, you have, you have some sort of mechanism that will allow you to be a good person or a person who doesn't tell lies or one who deceives people or one who does deceit.
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And every once in a while, you can change it, right. It's sort of like a pleated furnace filter, some located somewhere, and the deceit finally ate a hole in it. So it became deceitful and it destroyed itself. This is the French word for shadow, and we all know the smoke and mirrors situation with CIA and covert obsolescence and things like this. So this piece basically has a polished surface. And so information passes through it and information is reflected on the wall. So I regard it as a kind of smoke and mirrors piece. This is another piece that I did, and this piece spawned about 15 pieces like it, that I built around the United States. It's basically it's made out of bronze. It has a one side is in both sides are in Cyrillic. One is a chart like Vernie aries tableau that you see on this side and on the other side is a text which needs to be deciphered.
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We all know the myth of the Medusa, right. I found is I, I felt as if I was going to make a piece like this, the incendiary information around it. And there was a light inside it that projected or broadcast this, this information all over the roofs of the gallery and including my petrified tree, which obviously turned to stone, having been subjected to this. And the only word in the whole room is Medusa here with the last letters being USA. So basically this was the beginning of a whole series of pieces I did that supported the projects that you're going to see next. So I show works in museums and galleries. I also do public art projects. The public art projects are what support me, but with a U S economy being what it is, public art projects, are one of the first things that gets hit.
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But this is a piece I did at Louisiana State University in the department of energy coast and the environment. And so this is the same department that studied the big blowout disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and the oil spilled out and poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. And interestingly, my two cylinders here use texts describing natural gigantic natural oil spills, like the Strait of Santa Barbara in 1760. When sailboats went into that area, the boat said that all you could see was burning oil for as far as you could see, or in Kirkuk, a similar situation happened. And so I thought that would be an ironic kind of thing to put in front of the energy coast and environment. This is a piece that the university of Texas in Houston, and I felt for students at university, it might be interesting to do a piece that more or less involves relationships.
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This piece is called a comma a and basically it uses about 15 different works of fiction from authors who deal with relationships from Ahmed to Milan Kundera many different authors in the native languages. I always use texts in my projects that work use the languages of the time in which the pieces were written. So if it was a classical Greek piece, it's in classical Greek, if it's a native American, it's a native American, it's in Arabic, it's in Arabic. And so these kinds of pieces, again, more or less represent the enlightenment or the broadcasting of information and the broadcasting of enlightenment over a large area. And again, this is a library at the university of Houston. It's called a comma a because if you look at it from above, it looks like a comma on a line of text. There's a black inlaid granite line that goes through the entire campus. And this is a comma on that line.
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Okay.
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Okay. So I did a piece a long time ago for MIT in Boston, Cambridge, and the microbiology department. Basically what I did is I did a projection on the floor. This is a white marble disk. That's inlaid into a dark granite floor. And in the ceiling up there, there's a very powerful projection system. And so the scientists at MIT can change the slides extremely easily slides your number slides, right? So today it would be an entirely different machine, but that this was a long time ago. So they changed this slide. So they were working on a certain cell at this time. Sometimes they put worms, sometimes the students on a sort of particular time of year put fairly pornographic images in there, but it does, you know, so it does have some interesting points. But the fact of the matter was I, that system that I used at MIT was an extremely expensive projection system that I couldn't afford myself.
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So while I had the projector, I built my own system, right? And so this is my projection system. All I did was buy the lens lenses from Austria and the rest of it. I built myself all the electronics and built myself, put a generator in the back of my Jeep, put a whole lot of large slides. These things take slides that are about 12 by 12 inches, took slides out West. A lot of the slides were, were black film with clear lines. And then I chose, I really went out there to emulate the cartographers cartographers were sent out of the American landscape and the Western landscape to map it. And they did it using transits and maps and created a whole series of maps and they photographed everything. So I basically decided that what I would do would be to emulate that kind of idea.
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So basically I set up my projection system in one area like this. This is my assistant with a generator and a Searchlight. And so on a, on a moonless night we would use a search light that washed the old landscape around it. This is two o'clock in the morning, 30 degrees, 30 mile an hour wind, there's 200 pounds of sandbags on, on everything to keep everything stable. I use a four by five camera set up with 200 pounds of sandbags on it to keep it still so that the image is what you see is exactly what it looked like at the time the photograph was taken. Now, this is, this was done in 1995, in 1995. And in contemporary photography, there were a lot of people playing around with, with computer gem, it generated imagery, right? And I said to myself, well, this is interesting.
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Maybe I'll just try to go out there and make some pieces that look exactly like they're made a computer they're computer generated. But in fact, I did it the hard way. So I went out there is an idiot, and I went out there in the middle of the night, in the freezing cold. It did every did every one of these pieces that way. So the scale of some of these things was gigantic. Like my assistant is down here with the projector. I am a mile away from her with a CB radio in my camera. She's projecting an image 2000 by 2000 feet on a beaut in Canyon lands in Utah. So she takes, she turns the projector on washes the landscape with a Searchlight. And then I take an image that in this case there was no moon. So that the star trails are the only thing that tell you about how long the image was.
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This is Shiprock, New Mexico. The image we projected that night at two o'clock in the morning was 3000 by 2000 feet. We were a mile away from the object when we took it. So basically what you see is not a grid frame that you would computer generate. It is the real thing. So we had people draw trying to make it out to us because they thought it was some sort of beam me up Scotty moment. And they were witnessing some bizarre event. And so we had to make ourselves as inaccessible as humanly possible so that these all terrain vehicles and all manner of people could reach us in the amount of time. It took for us to do the images, because it would have destroyed the whole ambiance of the site, having, you know, all the cars and motorcycles. This is another very simple piece on these sandstone Hills.
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These sandstone Hills now no longer exist because all terrain vehicles have more or less destroyed them. And so a lot of the stuff that we did, then we can no longer do. This is a hole in this rock up here. So we, I, this is again two o'clock in the morning, but it was a full moon. So basically this whole projection, the projector is like way over here, right? And so I'm projecting something from again, a half a mile away, but it's like topographically inspired. So I use, I projected topographic grids and things and wines on objects. I had topographic projections. Then I also had implied geometry direction. So the whole imply a certain type of geometry that I would project on it. The triangular form that you saw before was, again, another kind of another kind of geometric form that I thought was appropriate to the site.
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This piece was done in Bandon, Oregon. The, the projection was again about a half a mile away. You can see where the lines are for the projector. They go way off, down here, right? So the projector was here. This was in fog, which is fairly dense at night. These two islands are two miles apart. So the projection was very large and you can see the images in the fog itself. And I liked the fact that it was again, Hey, that's a could be considered virtual image, maybe. I mean, that's pretty radical, but that could be considered virtual image. So this trip, this one that I, this last one where I took this image, I also traveled to a place called White Sands in New Mexico, White Sands, New Mexico is an exquisite site. I thought I was going to project on white gypsum, sand dunes. But in fact, I went to the little store.
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There was a little store next to the park headquarters. And they sold a little pamphlet that says, this is the … 20 miles North of here they exploded the first atomic bomb on July 15th, 1945 at 5:30 in the morning. So you can imagine at 5:30 in the morning, you're in New Mexico, you're asleep. And all of a sudden the sky lights up, this is the first test. That sky lights up like it's dawn. And you wake up and you look around and groggily you look over at your radium clock dial. And your radium clock dial is telling you it's only 5:30. So I thought it was ironic that radium clocks were telling people it was the first bomb blast. So I went around Alamogordo in New Mexico, collecting radium clock dials from antique stores that were used at that time in New Mexico
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for those atomic blasts. The radium itself is no longer. The radio itself is just as strong with the phosphor that was mixed with the radium on the clock dial is no longer in effect is as strong as it was. So basically some parts of it are brighter. Some parts are darker. I clamped the radium clock dial one end of a box, the four by five camera at the other open the shutter for two weeks. And these are the images that came out. So again, these irons of images I show in galleries and museums as part of a project that I call Atomic Time.
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I went around Los Alamos,
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New Mexico, and after my trip to White Sands, New Mexico, and I put up little signs in retirement homes and coffee shops. And I said, do you have anything left over from the Manhattan Project? The Manhattan Project was that project in which the United States built and designed and exploded the first atomic bomb. So I, I started getting these calls and I go over to somebody's house. And like in one person's house, they had these two objects here and they were being used as, as bells in bird baths in people's backyards. And in fact, I knew from my measurements that I'd taken the design of the atomic bomb is still classified, especially the physics package, which is on the inside the one physicist designed in order and then compressed. And then which we exploded in, exploded into devastating power. This, this particular one I built was the one exploded over Nagasaki.
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So this is actually a pusher sphere and it's an aluminum, a very thick aluminum sphere. And so in addition to these other smaller … spheres are other atomic bombs at different times in the period. So by 1945, it was this size by … about 1950. It was this size. And by 1955, it was this size and these are all original aluminum prototypes for the first atomic bomb. And I collected all these and built them into this installation, which is called Atomic Time. And so basically I, I got equipment from that period, like again, all collected in Los Alamos. So these are all, all these electronics are made in Los Alamos and the spheres I machine myself into probably the most accurate representation ever made of the internal physics package of the atomic bomb. So in an atomic bomb, this is the plutonium sphere.
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It's in two pieces, there's one here and there's one here. And this little piece is made of uranium 238, and this section clamps inside this section. So it makes a solid cylinder of uranium, 238 with a plutonium cylinder in the middle of that. And then inside there's a polonium initiator and the initiator sits nestled in. I had a lot of this stuff made by jewelers as did the old Los Alamos people. Then this piece is assembled with the bottom half. Those two sections go together perfectly. And that is the exact, this is the most perfect representation ever made of the internal internals of an actual atomic bomb. Again, still classified at the time. This was like 19, I guess I did this to started in 1998, before 9/11. So atomic time, this is a picture from Los Alamos. And you'll notice this stool back here.
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I use these stools in my installation. You might've seen it back here. These stools right here were favored by the physicists at Los Alamos because they represent the nuclear cloud ring cloud and the whole nuclear mushroom cloud. They liked them, they got off on it. There were lots of jokes about that funny stuff. So anyway, so that's the deal is that I made this, it did this installation. This is a experiment carried out of Los Alamos in which one person died. They took the top off of that thing you saw previously. And there was a blue glow on the room, chairing cough, radiation. One person died very, very quickly within hours. And two other people died after that. I modeled my installation after this piece. And also this piece, you'll notice this guy holding this white sheet up here. Oops, once again, this guy holding this white sheet up here covering the atomic bomb sections that are behind it.
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This is called a critical assembly. Now in this, this right here, this object right here is the 19. This is like 1942, but that's the 1939 oscilloscope. I actually, in my collecting down in Los Alamos, I actually got that particular Faciliscope because I could tell by the numbers on it that the property numbers were correct. And so a lot of the stuff that I used again was the real thing. This is what's called a critical assembly. This is the way the peop the texts at Los Alamos determined how much plutonium was required, or how much uranium, 238, 235 was required to make a nuclear weapon. So it was interesting because all of these pieces are like they're tables at about this height. Okay? And so the tables were made out of plutonium and uranium and beryllium and various other metals. And you can see how the radioactive materials at night, they lower them down, like in an auto shop underground on this tall hydraulic cylinder here, right?
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So it, during the day they walk in the room, they'd flip on the switch and the plutonium would come up inside this little thing. And then they covered use graphite blocks all the way around the edges to moderate the neutrons and all the other particles coming off of the radioactive materials. But I thought it was that the, that the, the blocks are only about this high on a guy, right? So what are the, what are the guys really protecting from the radioactivity? Doesn't seem to matter. What's going on up here, radioactive, wiser, what's going on down there. It's just the center section that they're most concerned about, but almost every one of those things was made the same way to protect and just the right area. So this little guy right here, this is how much uranium, two 38 you need, this is how much plutonium you need.
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Pretty much the exact sizes of those objects. This is another piece from Los Alamos. This is a Los Alamos prototype piece. This is a piece that was brought out to me and in a fellow's hand who was about 90. And he said, I made this, I know exactly what this is. This is for a levitated core of a nuclear device. And I'll give it to you because I know nobody else is going to show this anywhere in a museum. I told these people was after in the United States, refuse to show the Enola Gay. And I told them, I show these pieces in museum because I thought they had historic content for whatever reasons, but I show them. And so these people brought these things out to me. So this is an original prototype from Los Alamos. Another, this is a, this is a, again, a copy of a, of an experiment carried out at Los Alamos to determine critical mass.
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This is a uranium mine. All through the United States and around Utah and Eastern Colorado, Western Colorado. There are these uranium mines, which are more or less open to the public. This is all run by the government. And it's the Bureau of Land Management. There's not a whole lot of protection over this, so anybody can walk right on in there, down there and be exposed to radon and every other imaginable toxic emission by, by uranium. So I decided I did a whole series of uranium, mine, open uranium mines all through the American West. Most of them have since been closed. But this was just a demonstration of how lax US government was about if you want some uranium just go get it. So I went and got it, right? So Marie Curie many years ago was the first person that did an autoradiograph.
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And so Marie took a piece of uranium and placed it on a piece of black and white film and got an image out of it. So I went out there, I went there. This actually, this piece is actually from the Belgian Congo. And I also got some from Joachimstal in Bavaria. And Joachimstal and the Belgian Congo uranium is very highly radioactive. I put it on two, four by five transparency film and exposed it for about a week. And depending on how powerful it was, how quickly that's, how quickly the image was created. And ironically it, interestingly, I did nothing to adjust the color on this. This is just the piece of uranium sitting on the film. So ironically, you have the blue same blue color of Cherenkov radiation generated by that particular Kodak film at that particular time. And so, again, this is film, I realized that stone age, but nonetheless, it still was interesting. This is another one, a piece of uranium taking its own photograph on a piece of film excited only by the emissions coming from the uranium.
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So there's this little farmhouse outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. And I had been told, I was interested in trying to find out more about depleted uranium. I had learned that depleted uranium is used extensively by the military, all militaries to blow up tanks. It had a particularly elegant solution to tank destruction. Uranium 238 is pyrophoric. So when it hits an object, it burns its way through. In addition to that, it's one of the heaviest substances. So weight combined with pyrophoria allowed it to penetrate the tank and then blow up whatever's in the tank and the occupants of the tank. So basically these projectiles are made with depleted uranium and they're relatively radioactive. It's mostly alphas and everybody claims there are no betas involved, but since film is not really film was not exposed necessarily by alphas. It was mostly exposed by betas.
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I took that projectile. I put it on a piece of four by fill four by five film. I let it make an autoradiograph of itself. So once I have the shell, once I have the audioradiograph, I made a series of several of these things. This is actually a projectile from the Vietnam era. It's called a pencil dart. And basically it would have a Sebo around it. And, but this is the uranium projectile. So there's this little farmhouse on the outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, way out in the country. And I go in the farmhouse and I always have my Geiger counter with me. And I go in the farmhouse and it's just click, click, click, click. And the guy's got this huge collection of Winnie the Pooh around in the living room. It's all Winnie the Pooh sculpture everywhere. And then upstairs, I walked upstairs and the Geiger counter starts going off in all his walls in his bedroom, over his bed.
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And his daughter's bedroom are these guys, right? Hundreds and hundreds of uranium projectiles. You realize there's a gun culture in the United States, but you're not necessarily aware of how significant the gun culture is. So this guy is collecting radioactive, depleted uranium stuff, and living with it 24 hours a day. So I made a deal with him. I said, listen, I'll give you a really great photographs of these if you'll send them to me. So we ended up sending radioactive projectiles back and forth in the U S mail for about a year. And so I get, I, I get uranium in the mail. I made a nice little styrofoam box and I styrofoam box. So you couldn't make it too much of a, of a reading from the outside of the box. And we he'd send me a projectile. I'd photograph it, send it back. He'd send me another one. This one on, just about right to nine 11, which time I decided it was probably best to assist. And I did
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In 1932
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At the Carnegie institution in Washington, DC the nuclear physicist at the time we're trying to do we're, we're we're fit, we're visioning lots of different materials on a quest. They hadn't found it yet. They had, they hadn't determined that uranium is the one that visions that's the, the, the, the elegant one, the great one, but they were trying lots of different things. And so nuclear physics at the time was the very people were a little afraid of it. I mean, but, but, but the physicist out of infinite wisdom decided that what they would make us it is they decided to make a observatory of atomic physics. They wouldn't call it a particle accelerator. Cause this is surrounded by a neighborhood. This is in a downtown neighborhood in Washington, D C. And so they made a nuclear physics observatory, unbeknownst to the neighbors.
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They were making a highly radioactive machine deficient uranium. So this is, I went to the Carnegie institution. I'm from Washington DC. I determined that after doing the Manhattan project piece, I realized the importance of the visioning of uranium. I decided that my mission would be to, to recreate the machine and recreate the experiment of visioning uranium. This is an artist rendering of the way a particle accelerator works from the 1930s and forties, right? So the particle accelerator is giving off this nice little proton beam coming down through here. Of course the guy's not wearing any there's no radiation protection involved at all here. So the beam is coming right through the floor and bouncing, hitting a piece of neutral. Probably beryllium coming into a cloud chamber of the cloud chamber is being photographed and that's mr. Sandorn standing there. So mr. Sanborn decided to do something similar to that.
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Well, I went into the department of terrestrial magnetism at the Carnegie institution in DC, and they showed that they decided to take me underneath the observatory. And I walked in there and there were lawnmowers in there. There are two by fours in there. There's every manner of construction equipment in there. And there's this little cat wooden cabinet on the wall. And again, my Geiger counter starts clicking like crazy. I go up there with clicking, like crazy. And I open up the door and lo and behold, the original chemicals from 1932 through 39 were still sitting in there along with the Assassin's choice, polonium 210, right there in plain view, of course, polonium 210 has a very short half life. So it wasn't really radioactive then, but the rest of these salts and chlorides were highly unstable. They are now all in the collection of the Smithsonian institution.
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Thanks to my discovery of these little objects. So I got these, I got drawings and photographs from the library at the Carnegie institution from 35 and proceeded in photographs of accelerator tubes and proceeded to make my own particle accelerator. So this is my studio in process. This is the beginning of the accelerator tube, the beginning of exterior to the tube. I moved along to emulate this machine. This was the first, very first particle accelerator at built at the Carnegie institution. And it was outside and they had various problems with it because flies would land on it and they try to get up to a million volts or 2 million volts and they couldn't do it. And so as a result, they ended up moving in insight ultimately, but I decided to do the same progression and they did. So I built a machine like this.
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It sat in the field. This is the machine that I built ultimately is 28 feet high as a 20 foot long accelerator tube here. And this generates 5 million volts. It's an electrostatic particle accelerator was basically the first type of the first one designed as a particle accelerator. Now I could have chosen a cyclotron and I wanted to build a cyclotron in my basement when I was a kid, but I was discouraged from doing it just because the cinder blocks were too heavy. So basically I decided to choose a particle accelerator because aesthetically they're far more pleasing than cyclotron cyclotrons are big, heavy, clunky, black things, which are very relatively unattractive to put it in a museum situation. So this is the kind of object that I made. And then lo and behold, it didn't work outside. So I, this is the smaller version of the Carnegie built inside.
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So I decided to emulate that and make my own small version. So up here is the, the the terminal. This is the Van der Graaff. I bet a million volt band to graph. I made. This is the, this is the accelerator tube. This is the accelerator in operation down at the bottom. You can see my cloud chamber just like in that photograph. The cloud chamber is illuminated from two light sources. There's a camera up here, video camera, recording the events happening in the cloud chamber. This is the top end of my cloud chamber top end of my terminal, all powered by car batteries, deuterium gas here. So I'm using actually a Deuteron beam. I recreated this part of the machine. I used the original electronics and everything is actually operated using small strings. The, I put that accelerated 30 feet away from my booth that is covered with an inch of led and two feet of water to protect me from the radioactivity.
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This is my rendering of an ion gun, very primitive made out of tail light bulbs for a car. It did succeed actually in burning my target. So I succeeded in getting a strong enough beam, just like the Carnegie did in 1939. So I burned the target. Then I replaced the target with beryllium right here. This is brilliant. So that the beam came down, hit the beryllium, the brilliant creative neutrons neutrons came across, hit a piece of uranium in the middle of that chamber. This is the Carnegie's image of that chamber. When they sufficient uranium, they got six neutrons a minute, I got six neutrons, a minute I more or less recreated their experiment and got exactly their same result. So my, the next video is of my accelerator in operation, you can see some fishing events occurring in this. There is one event that occurs.
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You only see secondaries. You can't see the primaries, but you can see a secondary has come off the accelerator at the bottom. What you hear in the background, celery or an operation, and the sun cosmic rays see uranium giving off is at the top of the uranium every once in a while. And this was over a three month period of steady video, trying to determine at what point I did achieve fidget in this cloud chamber. So basically after very many, many months, I found one piece of video that did show actual official events, and that's more or less what's happening here. This is loading the entire machine on a truck to take it to an exhibition and a major museum in the United States at the museum of contemporary art in Denver. This is the machine on its side, more or less a fallen icon, a big science.
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So I felt as if this was one of the very first types of machines to be used, I enjoy having, I enjoyed the concept of having, you know, a big science on its side. Obviously I could operate the machine. This is the booth I operated the machine. And then these are the strings I operated at with a use a pair of binoculars to see the vision events in here. I could tell efficient when a vision events were happening because the Geiger counter would go off the chart when visual events occurred. And so that's the way I operated that machine. And this was called terrestrial physics, and it was been exhibited in two or three museums around the United States. And this is this accelerator that I did fishing the uranium with. This is part of the original machine. The Carnegie institution gave me original parts from the Carnegie machine from 1930s in which I use the vacuum system.
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And then this resistor, I determined how much voltage I was getting out of my large accelerator. This is my new work, nothing like the other work, tired of radioactivity. So basically what I'm doing is this is an auction page from Sotheby's. And so what I've done with this auction page there is right now, my work is about looting of antiquities and particularly the looting of antiquities sandstone sculptures. And so basically I have gone to Cambodia and I have infiltrated looting and forging gangs in Cambodia. Okay. So this is a military general is the Cambodian general whose compound has two large looted antiquities lying on the ground. And he's trying to sell these for about $130,000 each. So this, basically my work is about infiltrating these organizations and then somehow trying to make a difference in how these things are, are, are done in the, you know, how there, I'm trying to reduce the number of looted antiquities by flooding the market with high end forgeries.
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So, so I'm playing around with the CIA and then I played around with nuclear fission playing around there's other, fairly dangerous things. I feel like there's somebody in the background who protects me from time to time like the CIA or something, because I did, you know, I gave them that sculpture. I don't know what it is. This is a looter standing. This is a forger. This is probably Cambodia's best forger. You're standing next to the museum catalog photographs of his work. So these are the catalogs. And these are the pieces that are in major museums in the United States that he has actually forged himself. So working with the metropolitan museum, Oh yes. This is a forged document from last year, from the Cambodian ministry of culture, which this is the way that the looting and forging is allowed to keep occurring routinely because forged documents can be gotten for any art objects.
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So that if you get a genuine sculpture made out of sand stone, a forged document is made like this to accompany that real document and that real, the real sculpture. So the real sculpture gets out of the country as a forged sculpture. So that's the way that the whole system works. So basically I've used, I had Cambodian sculptors in Cambodia make high end replicas for me. They, I brought them back to this country. I aged them. So that they're imperceptible from genuine antiquities and now use them as museum installation. So this is a Sotheby's catalog, traditionally objects in the jungle. The arms and head and feet are broken off. So the torso can be sold separately and the head can be sold separately. So I had the head arms and feet carved, and I juxtapose it with the Sotheby's catalog that I had digitally altered.
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So this had arms and feet fit my head, arms and feet. So this is now the kind of work that I'm doing. This, this is a forged piece here that I inserted into a Sotheby's catalog. The looting rope represents the looters access or the dark arts going on underground. And this is above ground. So these are the kinds of things I'm doing in today's market. The easiest way to get sculpture is to get the GPS coordinate cause somebody on the ground to give you GPS coordinates of a sculpture, you bring in a helicopter, you use high tech climbing gear, and you lifted out of the jungle and don't leave a trace and that's more or less the way things have been left. The last image here, though, I'm going to give you is something called. I did it, it's something called hydro. It's a video that is an art object in itself.
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And I discovered when I was working with dry ice in my cloud chamber, and basically it's a solid chunk of CO2. But it looks like ice. The sound that you hear in the background are calving icebergs and all of this sort of relates to global climate change and in all of these other things. And so this is just a part of, this is going to be a part of hybrid after these two these, the Cambodian artists that I have working for me these are generally orphans from the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian government is giving these people jobs to carb, various objects for people who want them. So I'm bringing these objects back to the United States. They'll be used in a large installation about looted antiquities. And then after that is hydro
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That's it [inaudible]
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Anybody have any questions? Yeah, thanks a lot for it. Absolutely fascinating talk. I always have to dig up funding for my projects. And if I look at the
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Efficient installation, for example, that you did, can you give us an idea of first of all, how much that cost and second, how you got the funding for it.
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You remember the projection, the projection cylinders in front of the department of energy, coast and environment. Those, those projects funded, funded terrestrial physics, terrestrial physics cost me about $120,000 us. And so that basically was just one public art project. Usually my public like CIA, the CIA commission was $250,000 in 89. Most of the projects I do now are a couple of hundred thousand dollars. So that's the way I do it. And it just take every cent pour into that.
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What about the Fision installation, you know, where you actually build these features?
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That was all about $120,000. I built every bit of it myself. I mean, if I had, if I had farmed it out, it would have cost me a fortune, but I mean, I welded that sphere together. I soldered all the electrodes together. I built the entire thing myself. You know, I have a couple of assistants that help out and I have a really good machinist close to me. And so that's the way I, I can pull that kind of stuff.
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That was a thank you very much for this fascinating talk. Did you ever get in trouble with any three letter agencies?
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Well, you know, it's interesting. I and I, I was, I wasn't kidding. When I mentioned that I I kind of have this shadow. It's interesting because that giant, the big electrostatic accelerator with the long tube sits out in the field. Right? Well, my, that field is just two miles away from the premier drone base in the United States, which is at Pax River. And Pax River is a top gun place where jet, you know, people don't have fly jet fighters and they were constantly drones flying overhead. I mean, literally constantly. And I know they saw it. I know they want to know what the hell it was because it gave off a whole lot of EMF. Right? They were, they were drones flying right over it when it was operating at 5 million volts. And, you know, there was some stuff going on in their screen.
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Right. And so I'm assuming they clicked in, they clicked in a little bit of information and said, who is this guy? Sanborn? And they go, if they go on the internet, they Googled me. They think, Oh, he's a CIA guy. Well, he's okay. I mean, they let him do it. Why not? So, but it was an interesting afterthought. We all are probably aware of the NSA has gotten into some, you know, deep doodoo over their previous monitoring of US phone calls and information and all of this stuff. For 20 years, freedom of information act information inquiry has been directed at NSA to find out if they tried to crack Kryptos and NSA is actually the cryptography arm of the US government CIA isn't. I knew that at the time, but I decided to use CIA because most people didn't know about the NSA.
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And so I chose it because when you think code and you think spies, you think all that stuff you think about CIA, you don't think about NSA. So lo and behold, the same week, CIA releases a huge dossier by one of their people who two years later after I did Kryptos solved the three sections of Kryptos with a pencil and a pen. Within one day, NSA the same day that all the records came out, NSA releases their multipage crack of Kryptos saying that cryptography team two spent four hours on it on, on a certain day of the week, and then cryptography team three spent... And as they put significant resources in cracking Kryptos, I thought that was, I don't know, some sort of vindication, but nonetheless their inclusion in every aspect of our lives, unfortunately. But for me, it's, I think kept me out of harm's way. Maybe that's an illusion. I should knock on wood.
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So if there are no further questions, thank you so much for letting us share all the work of your life. Very impressive.