Suicide Letter Wizard for Microsoft Word

Suicide Letter Wizard for Microsoft Word

Year: 
2000
Edition: 
2013
Suicide Letter Wizard for Microsoft by Olga Goriunova
© Olga Goriunova

Why should text-editing tools only facilitate orderly office work and not existential challenges? Suicide Letter Wizard for Microsoft Word is an application—and a piece of software art—written by Olga Goriunova that gives you (the user) the opportunity to create your own suicide note, custom-designed for your needs. Instead of wasting time thinking about how to express your feelings about the cold world we live in, you just follow eight simple steps to the perfect suicide note. The Wizard guides you from the very beginning to help compose the text from letterhead to conclusion and to choose a design that fits your personality when you are ready to quit and say goodbye to the world of the living. The application takes an ironic and dark spin on the (in)famous Microsoft Word Letter Wizard that proclaims to “make the user’s life easier” by providing prefabricated templates for letter writing. A methodology that connects with the spirit of tactical media and hacks it not only comments on the often absurd processes of standardization of our writing that tools like Word employ, it also counters the happy-go-lucky optimism of the dot com industry by showing that crises are a fundamental part of the “easy” life in computer culture.

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