FAX project

In 1981 Tom Klinkowstein joined ARTBOX and proposed a telefacsimile (FAX) project. FAX was virtually unknown then but we had heard of experiments between artists groups in North America.

The project took place on Aug. 5, 1981 between the Mazzo Club in Amsterdam and the Blitz Bar in Wien and was the first FAX project by artists in Europe. Christina Schopf from the Ars Electronica was present at the performance in the Blitz Bar and invited me to propose a telecommunications project for Ars Electronica 1982. The result was "Die Welt in 24 Stunden".

Robert Adrian: Art and Telecommunication 1979-1986: The Pioneer Years
src: http://alien.mur.at/rax/TEXTS/springer-e.html

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"Em 31 de outubro de 1980, o primeiro contato via fax entre artistas no Brasil, os protagonistas foram Paulo Bruscky em Recife e Roberto Sandoval em São Paulo.

1981: Telecommunications Performance via Facsimile, entre Tom Klinkowstein no Mazzo Nightclub em Amsterdam e Robert Adrian no Blitz bar, em Viena. Depois do intercâmbio de imagens previsto, o público pode também participar com o envio de textos desenhos e Polaroids. Eles estavam também conectados a rede eletrônica da Artbox."
Source: http://www.cap.eca.usp.br/wawrwt/textos/gilbertto3.html

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As far as I know, fax is now almost exclusively used by businesses (including many museums and galleries) that have not yet up-graded to integrated computer-based practices. For personal communication it has been largely supplanted by computer-based media — email and WWW. My fax machine died a couple of years ago and I have never felt the need to replace it. But when the WorldPool group (Norman White, Judith Doyle, Willoughby Sharp, et al) began experimenting with fax exchanges between Toronto and NYC in 1977 it was a truly exotic and magical medium. Even in 1981, when Tom Klinkowstein and I produced the first European fax project using group II machines (2 minutes or more for an A4 page) between Vienna and Amsterdam, people fell about in amazement as the blurry sheets of paper slowly emerged from the machine.

By the mid-80s all that had changed ... fax machines had become faster, cheaper and ubiquitous — every office had one — so the excitement of novelty was missing and the medium was not really capable of generating interesting content aside from the aspect of "telepresence": Of sharing a communication space. Fax had come to be viewed as simply another telephone peripheral and had become, like the telephone itself, invisible. Fax projects continued sporadically into the 90s but they were more or less exercises in nostalgia.

Interview with Robert Adrian about early telematic art, by Jeremy Turner, 2003.
src: http://www.openspace.ca/web/outerspace/RobertAdrianInterview2003.html

References:
Communication Art

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