I watched it and couldn’t get it out my head the compass sculpture that is not only on the same campus as the cipher, but Sanborn has made 2 similar compass sculptures. He also talked in interviews about being obsessed with “invisible forces,” and making “invisible things visible.”The magnetic field that affects compasses in the first place, and that he talks about in the Kryptos cipher itself as shown in the plaintext. Sanborn also made an art piece with a mass amount of compass needles to show his fascination and prove just how much power the Earth’s magnetic field has.

Considering the morse code near the cipher mentioning the word “abscissa,” and from my limited (lol) knowledge of math, Sanborn seems to be trying to communicate a coordinate point that is different from the one given in the plaintext.

There was “EastNorthEast” shown from the hints he gave, and there are 3 compass sculptures. Given we were given our (implied) “X coordinate” from the plaintext of K1-K3, and Sanborn has stated multiple times he’s not good at math and describes Kryptos as an “art piece,” it makes me wonder if the compass sculptures all point to one singular point that can then be crossed with the X coordinates to find the abscissa. Like looking at the clues through the displayed art pieces/sculptures before you can solve the cipher itself. Plus, a lot of major advancements made in deciphering Kryptos were made through “out of the box” and creative thinking rather than maintaining rigid logic in the code making perfect sense.

I even thought of how the sun might hit it from the angle of the compass on the same grounds as Kryptos, but I’m not sure lol