Jim Sanborn has been building science-based installations for many years. From 2000 through 2010 his works Critical Assembly at the Gwangiu Biennale and the Corcoran Museum and Terrestrial Physics at the Museum Of Contemporary Art Denver used self made and purchased genuine artifacts as set pieces in complex installations, so this new work it is not as large a departure as one might think. The physics related works studied the relationship between pure science and technology. This new body of work draws from his early training as an archeologist and later as an artist following the auction trade.

This “auction” folio contains a selection of images from his Without Provenance installation. The complete installation consists of over twenty works each with its attendant framed “auction” page. The dimensions and configuration of the “antiquities museum/auction preview” installation is variable. The auction folio may be used as a template for an installation catalog.

For several years a crisis has been brewing in public and private antiquities collections, and many collections have ceased to add to their holdings because incidents of murky provenance, repatriations, and questions of authenticity have increased dramatically. The introduction of fakes into the auction market began decades ago, and in the last few years this has become a serious problem for unwitting collectors, dealers and museums.

The works in this installation are not museum shop “replicas” because they are not cheaply mass produced. They are not “forgeries” either because this implies that the pieces are offered for sale as genuine antiquities which they are not. These pieces can however be called “high-end reproductions” or "Contemporary Antiquities".

Jim Sanborn has gone to great lengths to discover the complex and time consuming art of forging stone antiquities in order to present convincing objects for this installation and to provide an alternative to buyers of looted antiquities.

Working with conservation professionals in the US and master forgers in Cambodia Sanborn has uncovered the process for aging newly carved sandstone works that makes the pieces scientifically and aesthetically indistinguishable from genuine antiquities.

The idea for protecting genuine works from looters is simple; discourage the collecting of looted antiquities by injecting a high level of uncertainty into the buying experience, or offer buyers high-end reproductions: Are the desired objects genuine or high-end reproductions?

In order to dilute the criminal trade in looted objects French antiquities conservation groups have already begun the process by bringing out many of these forgeries from Cambodia so they can be sold legally as expensive high-end reproductions, and buyers are there, buyers willing to purchase Khmer artworks for their beauty, not their age.

By disseminating long hidden forgery techniques to a wider audience of artists in Cambodia and Thailand and by having Thai and Cambodian officials promote the export of legal Contemporary Antiquities, the process can move ahead. The only remaining obstacle is that the high-end reproduction market in Cambodia and Thailand is mixed up with the forgery market so that today most high-end pieces are being sold as genuine, thus making the transactions illegal. This is a big problem that is going to take a considerable international effort to overcome.

News: In 2015 Critical Assembly was permanently placed into the collection of the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque NM.

News: In 2015 Terrestrial Physics was permanently placed into the collection of Intellectual Ventures Inc. in Bellevue Washington.

In 1998 Jim Sanborn visited the Trinity Site where the first atomic bomb was detonated. This visit led him to a six-year project titled Critical Assembly during which he created a tableau based on the laboratory environment for the assembly of the first atomic bomb. This large installation began with concentrated research and then with many trips over a four-year period to Los Alamos NM where he acquired original spare parts and prototypes of the first atomic bomb and the laboratory equipment used to build them. The objects he was not able to acquire from former employees of the lab, he constructed.

Terrestrial Physics Sanborn's project predates that 1944 Los Alamos program by several years and focuses on the following event.

In a quiet residential neighborhood in Washington DC at 9:00 pm Saturday, January 28, 1939, the large particle accelerator at The Carnegie Institutions Department of Terrestrial Magnetism split the nucleus of the uranium atom for a small audience that included the physicists Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr and Edward Teller. This discovery paved the way for technologies as ironically disparate as nuclear medicine and, within just five years, the atomic bomb.

Working from the Carnegie physicist's original notes, drawings, and photographs in the Carnegie Library, Sanborn has reconstructed machines based on this information and repeated the original experiment; splitting the atom of Uranium. The installation, large digital prints, a video of the fission events and the accelerator in operation, form the basis of this body of work.

Terrestrial Physics and Critical Assembly soften the distinctions between art and science. These installations exploring the relationship between pure science and technology do not use science as just a starting point though; here, tools more often associated with science have become an integral part of artwork. These reinterpretations of the events and more importantly the influence of the visual context of these moments remind us of the risks, rewards and complexities of the decision-making processes involved.

Click here to see MCA-Denver YouTube video.

The narrative of the Kryptos artwork at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters has been unfolding for more than 35 years. From the top down struggle at the Agency about the highly publicized work to its robust life on the Internet, its involvement with the Da Vinci Code and its powerful effect on individuals and popular culture, the artwork has taken on a mythic life. Ace code-breakers at the CIA and a rival team at the super-secret NSA have worked for many months on the code without cracking all of the sections. The NSA has released their methods and you can click here to view them.

In the late 1980's when the piece was designed codes and coding were esoteric subjects. Code had not really penetrated the popular mindset. The well-publicized arrival of Kryptos (it has been front page news on multiple platforms) set the stage for a code revival. The blossoming of personal secrecy and code cracking as recreation have been gaining in popularity ever since. And the fact that an artist, with a little help, developed a challenging code enhanced its unconventional populism. Kryptos had deftly steered itself onto a parallel track with the advent of bank machine pass codes, personal pass codes, Internet secrecy and even national security.

The K4 section of Kryptos is one of the world's most famous unsolved mysteries. Recently it was the most Googled thing globally for two days running. Kryptos websites, chat rooms, and blogs abound. The artist continues to review dozens of attempts to crack the code on a weekly basis.

For 35 years the artist has responded to tens of thousands of letters and emails from potential codebreakers, but all of this will change with the auction of the Kryptos archive in November 2025.