What would you say, given one free minute of anonymous public speech? One Free Minute is a mobile sculpture designed to allow for instances of anonymous public speech.

The principal intent of One Free Minute is to investigate how communication in public space has been, and can be, altered by technology. Whereas cellular phone technology has increasingly created mobile private spaces in the public realm, metering human interaction in billed by the minute increments, One Free Minute seeks to return the public soundscape to the voices of its callers.

One Free Minute can be performed in both live and site-specific versions.

Live version:
Calls made to the sculpture's cellular phone are amplified live through a two-hundred watt speaker system. Callers get a maximum of one minute of anonymous speech time, which is broadcast from the horn over a radius of about up to two hundred feet. Calls to the piece are electornically timed by the internal controller, but are not otherwise censored. Callers revceive the live number in advance by email, or on the street through a simple printed business card. In the absence of live calls, the sculture's internal controller randomly plays back speeches from the internal MP3 speech archive.

Site-Specific version:
Recognizing that transformative speech is strongest when it references the community it exists within, One Free Minute can also be used to amplify the voice of a particular community. To do this, a call-in number is publicized within the community, and calls are collected over a month or two prior to the performance time. Additional calls are solicited during performances through a printed business card containing call-in information. These collected calls are then played back during the performance randomly by the sculpture's internal controller. Examples of this instantiation include San Jose Voices (San Jose), Une Minute Gratuite (Quebec) and Berliner Stimmen (Berlin).

On Anonymity:
Calls to One Free Minute are held in the strictest anonymous confidence. In an era when governments and public agencies are increasingly vigilant of who is saying what and where, One Free Minute puts a bit of a blur on the 'who' and 'where', meaning that, for example, ordinary citizens and activists alike can speak openly and without fear of recrimination.