Anima

You are standing before Anima, a towering cylindrical sculpture by the American artist Jim Sanborn. The work is crafted from heavy, carved metal and stands as a permanent fixture in the Mission Bay plaza at seventeen hundred Owens Street. While it appears as a solid monument by day, the sculpture undergoes a transformation at night when an internal light source projects a halo of shadowy text across the surrounding ground. The stenciled characters radiating from the cylinder are not random designs, but rather a curated collection of scientific and historical quotations. These excerpts represent a bridge between the arts and the biotechnology firms that surround the site. You will find inscriptions ranging from the foundational observations of ancient physicians like the Greek Claudius Galen and the Chinese imperial doctor Qi Bo to more modern references, including text from the Human Genome Project. The artist behind the work, Jim Sanborn, gained significant international attention for creating Kryptos, a sculpture located at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Virginia. That piece features complex, encrypted messages that have remained a subject of intense study for professional and amateur cryptologists for decades. By incorporating these historical, scientific, and coded elements into his work, Sanborn consistently explores the theme of making the invisible visible.