Science & Tech Quote by James Sanborn

Sanborn is talking like a sculptor who suddenly realized he’d been hired to build a metaphor, not just an object. Commissioned art - especially art tied to an intelligence agency - typically arrives with a quiet contract: make it beautiful, make it official, don’t make it awkward. His “epiphany” gently breaks that contract by reframing espionage as a kind of applied science, with its own methods, thresholds of evidence, and obsession with what can’t be directly observed.

The key move is his phrase “the science of espionage.” It’s a provocation wrapped in modesty (“actually”), suggesting that spycraft isn’t merely cloak-and-dagger drama but a disciplined system for extracting signal from noise. That dovetails with his medium: sculpture makes the invisible tangible, giving form to pressure, absence, and encoded meaning. Sanborn’s work is famous for turning secrecy into material - surfaces you can touch that still refuse to fully disclose their contents.

Then comes the slippery turn to “the invisible forces of man.” He’s not just romanticizing mystery; he’s pointing at the overlap between measurable phenomena (fields, waves, ciphers, patterns) and human drives that resist measurement (fear, ambition, loyalty, paranoia). In the context of an agency built on information asymmetry, that line reads like a warning: intelligence work can dress itself in the authority of science while remaining powered by deeply unscientific motives. Sanborn’s intent is to legitimize the theme without flattening it, positioning espionage as the meeting point where hard technique and human darkness share the same toolkit: concealment, inference, and control.