As part of Tom Williamson's trip to Massachusetts and New York, he and John Slemensek built a link between England and The United States.

Neither had ever written proper letters before and in striving to understand what they saw as a lost art they completed a cross-continental piece of sending a letter to each other to maintain communication. In addition to the letters, they threw in the competative element of also sending a stopwatch, racing to see whose mail arrived quickest.

On receiving the stopwatch back in England, Slemensek had found the following results:

Slemensek (England to America): 4 Days 9 Hours 36 Minutes
Williamson (America to England): 4 Days 4 Hours 19 Minutes

Williamson had won by 5 hours 19 minutes.

'The strength of what was essentially a quite casual piece was in the resulting feeling in the receiving of the letter from Tom. By chance I was up at six in the morning and went on to facebook to check for any messages from Tom and saw he was online. I had a written conversation with him as he sat on his computer across the world. It was nice to talk to him but I didn't really feel much from it. About half an hour later his letter came through. I rushed to open it and clicked the stopwatch. I then read his letter and it was something different. I read as he described his sitting in central park as he wrote the letter and it really felt like the letter was a genuine document from that moment in time. I could really picture him there and I began to feel really emotionally bound to the letter and began to realise how much I missed Tom. Having had the perfect comparison of the two forms of communication, I saw the real strength that physical letters have.'
John Slemensek

'It was really magical when I had received the letter, holding something in my hands which felt so distant and long ago. Seeing John's actual handwriting and collection of jigsaw pieces meant a lot to me because of the weird sense of alienation I had had from being so far away from home. Although it's nice and convenient to speak online, it doesn't have the same excitement to it, it doesn't have that personal edge.

'I enjoyed placing the jigsaw pieces around New York City, somewhere John has never been, but in essence, a part of him has now, and hopefully still is a part of the city. I scattered them on Brooklyn Bridge, around the outside of the Guggenheim and even one on top of Damien Hirst's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living".
Tom Williamson