Compose a letter in cut-out letters — then keep it, share it, or send it anonymously. An anonymous letter is delivered only to the artist’s private collection, never to anyone else.
In his contribution to the Internet project Shrink to Fit (2001/02), Hervé Graumann adopted the blackmail strategy of the anonymous letter. Web-site visitors can type a message whose letters look as if they had been cut out of a newspaper. The perpetrator’s traditional strategy of anonymity coincides with the anonymity of pressing the keyboard, thus digitally escaping the telltale fingerprint. However, the message cannot be mailed via the net; it has to be printed out and sent through real space via snail mail. As a result, the printed copy of the blackmail reassumes the status of an original. Once again, Hervé Graumann has established an unexpected, surprising link between two ordinarily separate systems in everyday life. The user cannot tap into the programming of the deep structure in this work, which makes it as non-interactive as Raoul Pictor’s. Nonetheless, action must be taken in order to understand the meaning of the work. Many of Graumann’s works link this relationship to an act that viewers can carry out – at least mentally – without belabouring the interactivity much vaunted in art in the wake of new information and communication technologies.
— Hans Rudolf Reust (excerpt from “Swapping surfaces”)
Contribution to the Internet project Shrink to Fit (2001/02).
2026 — restored and extended. What once had to be printed and mailed now crosses the net: the message is composed letter by letter and sent, anonymously, straight to the artist’s collection — the newspaper cut-outs of 2001 joined by the X, the f, the little a of the networked world.