Keyboard Monument

The Keyboard Monument is a concrete sculpture in Yekaterinburg shaped like a giant computer keyboard, standing on the Alley of the 280th Anniversary of Yekaterinburg Education, by the embankment of the Iset River, a couple of minutes' walk from the Geologicheskaya metro station and the Plotinka. It was created by artist Anatoly Vyatkin and unveiled on October 5, 2005.

History

The monument appeared as one of the installations for the "Long Stories of Yekaterinburg" festival, for which artists were invited to place works at various points around the city. Vyatkin's original idea was ironic — he envisioned the keyboard as a "graveyard of ideas" — but during the work the project's producers suggested changing direction: rather than burying ideas, the keyboard was to become a structure that lives and interacts with the urban space. The installation was meant to be removed after the festival, but residents liked it, and it was decided to leave it permanently. It is the first land-art sculpture on this theme in Yekaterinburg.

Design

The keyboard is built at a scale of 30:1 and consists of 104 keys arranged in the standard QWERTY/JCUKEN layout. The monument measures about 16 by 4 meters overall, and each concrete key weighs between 100 and 500 kg. The keys double as benches — visitors can sit on them and take photos.

In 2011 the F1, F2, F3 and Y keys disappeared from the monument; by August of that year they had been restored by an initiative group with sponsors' support.

Fame

In July 2018 The New York Times wrote about the monument — in a piece timed to the FIFA World Cup, it compared the monument to symbols of the Soviet era ("Move over, Lenin: Make Room for the Computer Keyboard"). According to a 2019 Yandex study, the Keyboard Monument ranked second among Russia's most popular monuments in search queries, after the Bronze Horseman in St. Petersburg.

Traditions

On the last Friday of July, System Administrator Day, computer mouse-throwing competitions are held at the monument. In spring, volunteer clean-up days are held here, when the keys are washed and repainted.