At Adobe, art and creativity are ingrained in the company’s DNA, so I’m excited to share the re-launching of San Jose Semaphore, a major public artwork by noted digital artist Ben Rubin, on display at Adobe’s San Jose headquarters. On Thursday, October 18 at twilight, four 10-foot high disks on top of the 17th floor of Adobe’s Almaden Tower will begin transmitting a new coded message.
San Jose Semaphore was first introduced in 2006 and based on the semaphore telegraph system developed in the 18th century. Commissioned by Adobe and the City of San Jose, it features LED-lit disks, which rotate to display a series of simple geometric symbols that spell out a complex coded message. Rubin created the artwork’s coded message using algorithms similar to those used in World War II-era cryptography. San Jose Semaphore’s initial coded message was deciphered later that year by two San Jose area research scientists, who revealed the encrypted message to be the complete text to Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novella, The Crying of Lot 49.