Thursday 10 June 2010

We won a Kickstarter Award!

Most Effective at Mystifying an Entire Village: Lenka & Michael, Mysterious Letters

Mysterious Letters is a project by Lenka and Michael, two artists who’ve decided to write everyone in the world a personal letter, one town at a time. In April they mailed everyone in a small Irish village a letter on the same day, and in November they did the same with a Pittsburgh neighborhood called Polish Hill. The aftermath, as we carefully detailed in this blog post, was enormous: tons of befuddled press (the BBC devoted five minutes to it — the broadcast is their project’s pitch video) and equally baffled letter recipients.

Among the anecdotes in the press reports was this amazing passage:

Anna Misiaszek, who runs Alfred’s Deli Plus with her husband, said the letter that arrived at their shop seemed silly. It read: “Next time someone tries to bamboozle you with the cup and ball trick (on holiday in Turkey, at a city bus station …) choose the cup on the right.”

“This is something crazy. I treat this like a joke,” she said Tuesday.

She initially tore up the letter and tossed it in the trash, but later retrieved it when she was told it was an art project.

Our final favorite bit? After the last mailing, signs began appearing all over Polish Hill proclaiming simply, “Don’t worry, it was an art project.”


By Yancey Strickler one of Kickstarter's founders, writing for the Kickstarter Blog

Irish Times - The Mysterious Art of Mailing the World...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/0218/1224264699840.html

by BELINDA MCKEON

Mysterious Letters - Pittsburgh News Report...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fx5McC-_Tk

Thursday 3 December 2009

Wednesday 2 December 2009

Associated Press

AP article here

Pittsburgh Tribune Review

The Smithsonian

The making of Mysterious Letters 2 here