Title | The Paper Enigma |
Artist / Creator | Thomas Parker Williams |
Artist's Nationality | American |
Place of Publication | Philadelphia, PA |
Publication Date | 2014 |
Subject | Ciphers, Code |
Process / Technique | Digital printing |
Structure / Binding | Three radial moving pages functioning as rotors |
Paper Stock | Davey board, mixed papers, mylar |
Dimensions (WxHxD) | 8.25 x 8.25 x 0.5 inches |
Edition Size | Edition of 16 |
Box / Wrapper | Custom Box |
Signed & Numbered | Signed and numbered |
The Paper Enigma by Thomas Parker Williams
$200.00
My Paper Enigma, based on the rotor concept used by the German Enigma Machine, is a working cipher generating machine capable of producing cipher-text and converting cipher-text back to plain-text or understandable language. It contains three paper rotors, Red, Blue and Yellow, each with ninety divisions. Since this machine is manually operated the rotors are set by hand. Three sets of ninety ciphers each, NUMERIC, ALPHA-NUMERIC and ALPHA-ALPHA are arranged randomly over the three rotors. Three alphabets, sequential, random order and numeric, are arranged over ninety positions that correspond to the ninety positions of the index outer circle. When the red, blue and yellow rotors are aligned with a predefined key the cipher sets that appear in the sliding window can represent the plain-text letter that they correspond to. The person receiving the coded message will align their rotors in the same position as the sender's and decode the message by using the sliding window.
Artist Bio
Thomas Parker Williams lives and works in Philadelphia, PA, USA. His work includes hand-made artist book editions, unique book works, printmaking, and painting. Some of his artist book editions contain an audio element - music or sound work - composed, performed, and recorded by the artist. Tom's artist books are in numerous private and public collections.