The King Has... (2005)
with Takashi Kawashima
Wood, Fabricated Slab Printer, Cell Phone, Custom Software

Catharsis
The installation The King Has... gave individuals the opportunity to unburden themselves of kept secrets, a source of stress relieved through disclosure. The project explored the types of secrets individuals would be willing to reveal under the veil of anonymity. At what point is sharing something private more important than the risk of being discovered?

Public Space
Critical to the installation was the idea of activating a public space to engage a diverse population. With a small population we were worried that individuals would be excessively concerned about being discovered, resulting in fewer, safer secrets. By mounting the secrets on building exteriors and engaging the street we were afforded braver submissions.

Materials
Submitted secrets were printed on uniformly cut panels of wood. Key to the decision to print on wood rather than paper was the depth and weight wood gave the submissions: wood panels made each secret an epitaph.

For the construction site installation panels were cut as large as the printer would accommodate (US letter) to block surrounding advertising and create a halo of focus around each secret. For the Westwood installation panels were cut to the size of the chosen building's bricks, giving the impression that secrets were gradually enveloping the building.

People reading the secrets had no reservations about touching the panels, feeling their weight. A number of panels were taken by individuals (for reasons unknown).

Seeding
Prior to developing The King Has... 50 people were surveyed determine if they would be comfortable anonymously revealing repressed secrets in a public space. Most indicated they were, but to be safe we chose to seed sites with our own secrets.

Installation Sites
Each installation site engaged a different audience. The Downtown site engaged a largely working-class Latino community including many children high school-aged and younger. While we received a minimal number of messages from this audience we witnessed numerous individuals touching the panels, validating the decision to use wood.

The Westwood site was visited by a number of college students as well as UCLA faculty and Westwood professionals. Passers-by took the time to stop and read the panels, with many subsequently contributing their own secrets.

Receiving Secrets
We decided that forcing individuals to enter secrets via a Web site was a bad idea:

First, doing so would have allowed those who had never visited the installation sites the opportunity to submit secrets. The project was about omni-directional sharing: it was critical to engage passers-by as they were reading the secrets of others.

Second, we wanted people to submit secrets spontaneously, rather than having to copy a URL, return home, and craft a statement.

Third, we wanted people to exert a small amount of effort in sending secrets to discourage spamming and casual secret fabrication (of course secrets were submitted anonymously making it impossible to truly distinguish fact from fiction).

Lastly, we wanted to give people who did not own a computer or have access to one the opportunity to engage the installation.

For these reasons we decided to use SMS messaging (available to virtually every cell phone user) for secret sharing.

The SMS system pulled incoming SMS messages from a pay-per-use cell phone and formatted them, saved them as PDFs and queued them for printing. Secrets were also converted to JPEG format and archived online at http://www.thekinghas.com.

Slab Printer
New secrets were printed nightly on a slab printer built from modifying 3 individual HP inkjet printers. The printer is capable of printing on panels up to half of an inch thick at page sizes up to US letter (8.5 in. x 11 in.). Red ink was mixed by hand to aesthetically complement the color of the wood panels.

  • Exhibited
  • September 28-October 2, 2006, Electrofringe, Newcastle, Australia
  • May 29-June 23, 2006, DNP Duo Dojima, Osaka
  • April 3-26, 2006, Ginza Graphic Gallery, Tokyo
  • November 6-11, 2005, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Presence/Absence