A nice-looking cipher mystery just arrived, courtesy of mystery man/woman “Vir”: his/her Vick Industries website has a 14-page art-house cipher that will no doubt intrigue a whole load of people. To my eye, it’s a sort of cross between the Codex Seraphinianus’ fussily over-evolved script and the desktop publishing zing of “Isaac”‘s CARET labs cipher.
Structurally, the text is written in columns of composite individual units, where most of the shapes are apparently formed of a palette of smaller shapes (thus resembling transcriptions such as Korean). Yet many composite units are repeated multiple times: I’ve only really checked the first page so far, and it looks as though half the composite shapes appear once, half appear multiple times. Here’s a version of page 1 I’ve added a little colour to, so as to make the repetitions a little more visible:-
This is, I guess, meant to resemble a formal design language, where the overriding design conceit seems to be to transform each word of the plaintext into a composite unit. Which may or may not actually be true, of course, but that’s what it resembles. As such, it seems that if you can transcribe it sensibly, you stand a pretty good chance of reading it. Maybe that’s the joke, who knows?
It’s not really my kind of thing (I’m more of an historian than a tinkery design crypto guy), but if it’s yours, go for it. Perhaps the mysterious “Vir” will emerge from the Vick Industries shadows before very long… we shall see!
The design of the glyphs reminds me very much of the Standard Galactic Alphabet…
Inside the downloadable zip file of images is a desktop.ini file with these contents:
I wonder if these folks are involved:
http://ragingmonkeyproductions.com/
Dave: why, I do believe you’re probably correct. 🙂
Established in 2010, Raging Monkey Productions is based in League City, TX, and is filed as being active in “Motion Picture and Tape Distribution”, with about 2 employees, one of which is probably Matthew Haidinyak.
Also: the hosting is with GoDaddy, the domain from DomainsByProxy.com, and most of the people to whom the announcement email was cc’ed were at US universities. So it does all look to be consistent with some kind of American art-house creative design team gag. But that’s just a guess. 😉
The Vicky Industries website is gone and the Internet Archive does not contain the original ZIP files.
Did anyone keep them?
Vicky Chaser,
you can find the other 13 pages at
https://web.archive.org/web/20160811092459id_/https://vickindustries.com/code.html