Geek Art: Can You Break the Cipher?

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painting_smallA good friend of mine, Ben Rossi, happens to be a very talented designer and painter. After admiring a painting of his for about a year, he finally decided to give it to me — probably just to shut me up. But before the ceremonious transfer, he decided to make some modifications to it. The name of the painting is now encoded in the metal plates screwed to the canvas. Can you figure out what it is?

You can see most of what you need to see in the small picture below, but there’s a hint that you might need in the lower left-hand corner, so I linked it to a larger version. That’s all I’m going to say for now. Who can break the code first?

 

6 thoughts on “Geek Art: Can You Break the Cipher?”

  1. I’m not really gonna take a shot at this. (and that “clue” (little black thing?) really isn’t very readable in the blow up) But I will say I dig on the mixed media here. It’s not often artists will affix stark clean things to their paintings, much less with real hardware instead of glue or tons of paint. To me, this begins to edge on becoming steam punk-ish, the organic flow combined with machined parts. Your friend will probably hate me for saying that, haha.

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  2. Charles,
    The clue in the lower left-hand corner is an 8 with a line above it. Sorry it’s not more clear — I compressed the image to avoid TypePad from getting angry with me. :)
    Christian

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  5. Ah. Well I would never get that, I don’t even know what “octal ASCII” is!
    For extra large images, don’t forget about Flickr. They let you have any size you want :) Is this hanging somewhere in your house? I’d love to see it in person next visit.

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  6. @Charles and Alan,
    I’m glad you like the piece, it was enjoyable one to produce and really took inspiration from the Cantrells to “finish” it appropriately.
    Charles, I don’t at all mind the steam-punk comparison. I like to consider myself a “technologist tethered to the physical” (how’s that for an esoteric designer’s statement!), and because of this, I try to work in multi-media as often as possible.
    I don’t think I have ever consciously considered applying the design tenants of the steam-punk to anything I have produced because I am not terribly anachronistic. Though… you have me thinking… a fully-functional, albeit mechanical, steam-driven* iPhone…
    -Ben
    *ok, not “fully-functional”, just “looks like it is fully functional”

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