Cyrillic Projector

Located in the plaza between Fretwell and Friday is the Cyrillic Projector. The projector is a sculpture created by Jim Sanborn with a secret message encrypted on it.

 

I noticed the sculpture one night walking through campus. I had passed by the same exact spot many times before during the day and never really payed much attention to it, however at night it is almost impossible to miss. I was very intrested in it, it seemed to be in a odd language with weird symbols and letters. I went back to my dorm and decided to try and figure out what exactly this sculpture was all about, and this is what I found...

 

"The Cyrillic Projector is an encrypted sculpture at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, that was created by Washington DC artist Jim Sanborn in the early 1990s. It was inspired by the encrypted Kryptos sculpture that Sanborn created two years earlier for CIA Headquarters. The message on the Cyrillic Projector has turned out to be in two parts. The decrypted first part is a Russian text encouraging secret agents to psychologically control potential sources of information. The second part appears to be a partial quote from classified KGB correspondence about the Soviet dissident Sakharov, with concerns that his report to the Pugwash conference was being used by the Americans for an anti-Soviet agenda.
Sculptor Sanborn created two codes -- One for the CIA's Kryptos sculpture, and another lesser-known one related to KGB operations. The CIA's Kryptos sculpture attained international media attention in 1999 when it was announced that the first three sections of the Kryptos code had been solved independently by two different cryptographers. Part 4 of Kryptos remains uncracked to this day, and was what sparked the creation of the Kryptos Group in May 2003. The group currently has about 70 members from at least four different continents, and includes cryptographers, mathematicians, game developers, academics, and other interested hobbyists. Along with investigating the Kryptos code itself, the group is also closely examining other elements related to Kryptos, such as other sculptures created by artist Jim Sanborn, including the Cyrillic Projector." http://elonka.com/kryptos/CyrillicProjectorAnnouncement.html

I visted the sculpture at night when it was lit up so I could get another look at it now that I had a better idea of what it was. Since I was there at night I did not see many people walking by, there was not a lot of action, no real noise besides the common noises you would hear at night. To me the work itself speaks enough about literacy. The encoded message that took so long to be decrypted, and the secret message it holds. A secret message in a different language is literacy.