A Monument to Collective Honesty

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A Monument to Collective Honesty

• What is uttered in the heart alone will win the
  hearts of others to your own. - Johann Wolfgang
  von Goethe

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• Synopsis
• The purpose of the Monument to Collective Honesty
  is to incite and encourage sincerity to those who
  interact with it. By creating an anonymous forum
  to air out a persons unspoken truths in a
  macroscopic sense, the Monument to Collective
  Honesty hopes to create a sense of community in a
  world where candor is smiled upon, but is
  functionally and socially unacceptable.

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• Background
• How many of us today have lied to get ahead, and
  how many of us have unspoken secrets weighing us
  down? In todays world, the concept of truth has
  become little more than an antiquated ideal
  charming, but socially useless. Perhaps
  hypocritically, I find myself searching endlessly
  to find the sincerity that I know must exist
  somewhere behind the faces of the people I meet
  from day to day.
• Perhaps by my own definition a memorial to the
  concept of honesty is more appropriate, but I am
  old-fashioned and cling to the concept. Thus, my
  monument proposal is not a memorial to sincerity,
  but rather an attempt to create a socially
  acceptable monument for truth of any kind, one
  that reveals the similarities between peoples
  darkest secrets and draws its viewers together as
  a community, and more importantly, that engages
  the viewer as a potential participant.

The Monument to Collective Honesty is inspired in
part by Frank Warrens Postsecret, an ongoing
community art project in which anonymously mailed
secrets are displayed week by week. The monument
hopes to evolve upon Warrens original concept
and introduce it on a larger scale.
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• Project Description
• Physically, the basis for the monument is
  unimposing at first little more than a mounted
  touchscreen computer on a pedestal located in the
  center of San Franciscos Union Square.

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• On inspection of the pedestal, the passerby
  is invited to type in, anonymously, a statement
  in twenty words or less that is both personal and
  completely true.

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• The Users statement is then added
  electronically via network connection to a
  computer database for review. Spam messages are
  erased manually by the , but all others are kept,
  regardless of content.

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• Every hour on the hour the database selects a
  random statement and projects it from a
  high-powered projection unit housed within a
  small office space directly across from San
  Franciscos Union Square Macys. Macys was
  selected for two reasons because it is a broad
  building in a high-traffic area and a projection
  onto it would be both noticeable and legible, and
  because it is a corporation which exemplifies the
  socially acceptable dishonesty popular today.
• The random statement is shown in large letters in
  high definition.

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Benefits

• By displaying it on a macroscopic scale, the
  truth is made available to the public at large
  airing it out, and allowing the public to
  identify with it without being able to pass
  judgment on its creator.

Viewers who are able to identify with the
macroscopic truth will possibly be incited to
share truths of their own via this public forum.
Ultimately, the Monument to Collective Honesty
hopes to inspire sincerity throughout its
viewers daily lives.
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Estimated Costs

• High Definition Video Projector - 1800
• Mounted Computer Pedestal - 1000
• Touch-Screen Monitor - 600
• Computer Network - 300-1500
• Pedestal Construction - 500
• Union Square Office Space - 45 per square
  foot/year

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Timeline

• Implementation of the Monument should
  theoretically take less than a month neither
  construction and implementation are work
  intensive, and the Monument would be fully
  operational shortly after its immediate
  installation.

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