Moveable Type “is an artwork commissioned for the ground-floor lobby of The New York Times Building in New York City. When complete, it will be a dynamic portrait of The Times. Statistical methods and natural-language processing algorithms will be used to parse the daily output of the paper (news, features, editorials) and the archives, as well as the activity of visitors to NYTimes.com (browsing, searching, commenting).”

Semaphore “is a permanent public artwork … Located within the top floors of Adobe’s Almaden Tower headquarters … a multi-sensory kinetic artwork that illuminates the San Jose skyline with the transmission of a coded message. The content of the San Jose Semaphore’s message is a mystery; cracking the encryption technique and deciphering the message is posed as a challenge for the public.”

The semaphore has been solved. More interesting than that article are these two documents: This pdf by the two men who solved it describes the process they used. This pdf by Ben Rubin, who created the semaphore, describes the solution.

A profile of Ben Rubin in Metropolis from 2002 includes a description of a study he made to improve the sound design in the New York subway when a Metrocard is swiped and when trains arrive.