Pyrography on wood, sealed with polyurethane.
Measures 19x9". Sawtooth hanger on reverse.
Price includes domestic ground shipping.
Email katsaturnarts@gmail.com for international or expedited shipping.
Background Information: The Austin Bridge Cipher is the final entry in this series, and it's one I guarantee you've never heard of unless I've told you about it personally, because I was the creator and moderator of the group dedicated to decoding and analyzing it (this led some to suspect that I created the cipher, but this is not true - I was living here in Portland at the time). The Austin Cipher started in 2015 with a post in a group called Unresolved Mysteries. A man reported finding a plain sheet of paper bearing a coded message taped to a pedestrian bridge in Austin, and wondered if anyone could help decode it. Someone responded and cracked it - which was lucky, as it was apparently an entirely new form of cipher which the author had invented. The message decoded to, "THREE ZERO SEVEN WALNUT SO SF CA," which turned out to be the street address of a Masonic Lodge in South San Francisco, and some information about when and where the next message would appear. I was fascinated by the simplicity and ambiguity of this first message, so I created the Austin Cipher discussion group. Messages like this would follow, with one appearing almost every week for several months, encrypted using a variety of cipher methods, and always found on or near various bridges in Austin. Some included snippets of song lyrics, some were crudely illustrated (including what seemed to be a drawing of murdered journalist Danny Casolaro), and later messages contained references to obscure topics such as the Apocrypha, and the Norse and Egyptian pantheons. One message gave a name to the series: the Ophiuchus Project.Eventually the signs stopped appearing, and the "game" was surreptitiously taken over by one of the group members, who tried to keep it going by adding online components, including a "numbers station" style online radio site, culminating in a final puzzle which we collaborated to “win”. The coded signs briefly started appearing again in 2016, but at that point there was no longer much of a following, and the messages quietly ceased, but I've remained friends with several members of the discussion group. The purpose and meaning of the messages is still entirely unknown.