Got a Secret? So do I.

by Pete Aleksa

“You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession or childhood humiliation. Be brief. Be legible. Be creative,” read the instructions on the self-addressed, but otherwise blank postcards dispersed in late 2004 in the Washington, DC area by artist Frank Warren. It was from this initial venture—spurred by a curiosity in community art and the revealing nature of the postcard, bearing greetings from summer camp or Disneyland, unenclosed and open to the world—that the burgeoning PostSecret began.
With over 3,000 submissions received and a great deal of word of mouth popularity, the site has recently been garnering more and more attention. A traveling exhibition is being set up and a book of art from the site is planned for next year. In addition, MTV-friendly band the All-American Rejects were given permission by Warren to use the idea and some of the artwork from the project in their new video Dirty Little Secrets in exchange for a donation to the National Hopeline Network, a suicide prevention hotline.
Strolling through the virtual PostSecret gallery is a bit surreal. Words and images combine to form visual representations of the thoughts, fears, and desires of countless strangers. Sitting there, reading such shockingly open confessions, often heartbreaking or disturbing but occasionally humorous, its easy to disassociate the postcards from the senders; to forget that you are peering into the deepest held secrets of actual people. Secrets that when collected and displayed paint a vivid and unique portrait of the human condition with themes centering around alienation, regret, fear of intimacy, and guilt.
PostSecret.’s format, with its impermanent and anonymous, communal art is a decidedly postmodern display, one that fits well with its subject matter. As Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “It is the confession, not the priest that gives us absolution.” This is what PostSecret provides, a way for people to confess their most intimate secrets in an anonymous community, that of the Internet. I wonder though if the success of PostSecret isn’t evidence of a trend of increasing technological isolation in which people seek to avoid real-life interpersonal relationships, conversations and experiences with safer, anonymous substitutes.