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Adobe's Mysterious Glowing Orb Code Is '60s Novel

Adobe Semaphore Display Marks First Anniversary

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- San Jose city officials and a group of code crackers revealed the message Tuesday behind a set of four revolving circles atop the Adobe Almaden Tower in the city's downtown.

Two Silicon Valley technologists, Bob Mayo and Mark Snesrud, unraveled the mystery behind the artwork's coded message.

The four, 10-foot-wide illuminated amber circles were revealing text from the 1960's book, "The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon.

"Given the artwork's location in the heart of Silicon Valley and concept, a semaphore, there really was only one logical choice for the text: Thomas Pynchon's 'The Crying of Lot 49,'" said artist, Ben Rubin, the creator of San Jose Semaphore.

"Although he wrote the book in the mid-1960s, Pynchon's setting is a fictional California city filled with high-tech corporate parks and the kind of engineering subculture that we now associate with the Silicon Valley. The book follows the heroine's discovery of latent symbols and codes embedded in this landscape and in the local culture. At its heart, San Jose Semaphore is an expression of what Pynchon calls 'an intent to communicate,'" Rubin said.

In addition to their own ingenuity, Mayo and Snesrud wrote a computer program and used the Google search engine to help them solve the puzzle. It took the pair more than two months to crack the code.

"I spent a lot of time in a parking garage near Adobe with a video camera," Mayo said.

According to Amazon.com, the first sentence of the book (ISBN 0-06-093167-1) reads:

"One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executer, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary."

Pynchon was born in 1937. Other notable works include V., Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland and Mason & Dixon, according to the book's back cover.
According to Mayo and Snesrud, the basis for cracking the code started with their own "intent to communicate."

"A few weeks before, Mark and I had met each other at a communication skills seminar. Actually it was a how-to-flirt-with-women seminar. We were eager to put things to the test.

After dinner in Downtown San Jose, we decided to explore the surrounding areas to see if we could locate a fun place to hang out. As we crossed Almaden Boulevard, the amber discs of the San Jose Semaphore stood out against the night sky, presenting a display that engaged our curiosity.

Not much progress was made on our social explorations that night, but the decision was made to try to solve the puzzle that the San Jose Semaphore posed," said Mayo, former computer scientist at HP Labs.

After accepting that challenge, Mayo and Snesrud relied on their deep high-tech expertise and unyielding determination to begin cracking the code.

"San Jose Semaphore offered us a compelling puzzle with clues through its illuminated discs and its AM and online soundtrack. When combining the technological aspects with the aesthetics of the art, San Jose Semaphore posed a formidable challenge that definitely synthesizes left-brain analytics with right-brain creativity. And, it was simply compelling to watch," said Snesrud, an engineer with Santa Clara-based W&W Communications whose career also includes positions at Sun Microsystems and Intel.

Located within the top floors of Adobe's Almaden Tower, San Jose Semaphore consists of four illuminated disks composed of 24,000 LED lights, LEDs donated by Philips Lumileds in San Jose.

The disks continually shift and turn, engaging viewers on a visual and kinetic level while providing a steady, glowing, and purposefully moving presence on the San Jose skyline.

The giant illuminated disks rotate to a new position every eight seconds and pulse out a message using a visual coding system that is intended to be deciphered. An online audio broadcast provides a soundtrack of spoken and sung letters, numbers and musical tones to help decode the message.

Semaphore refers to a traditional system of visual signals that convey information via the changing position of lights, flags or hands.
Intended as a meditation on the coded nature of communication, San Jose Semaphore's illuminated disks assume four distinct positions: vertical, horizontal, and left and right-leaning diagonal. With four wheels and four positions each, San Jose Semaphore has a vocabulary of 256 possible combinations, creating a way of communicating its encrypted message, known -- up until Tuesday -- only to the artist and those involved with the installation.

Cracking San Jose Semaphore's coded message was posed as a challenge for the public when it debuted August 2006 at the beginning of the biennial ZeroOne San Jose, a festival showcasing digital art from around the world.
"Bob and Mark's discovery will further attract attention to San Jose Semaphore and help elevate its status as a beacon for Downtown San Jose," said San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed.

City leaders said the San Jose Semaphore is one of the largest new media public art projects in the U.S.

Rubin's exhibitions have appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Skirball Center in Los Angeles.

For more information, please visit San Jose Semaphore.com.

Too cool... :thumbsup

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