Transmission and Distance: Unveiling Artistic Fax Collaboration and Circulation of Images

The advent of the fax machine brought about a revolution in the art, providing artists with new avenues for creative expression, communication, and research. It did give rise to groups of artists, mainly belonging to the Mail Art and Copy Art movements, who exploited the fax machine to instantly transmit works usually created on the basis of the xerographic language of photocopy machines from the 1970s to the 1990s. The fax was used not only as an artistic tool, but also to develop new strategies for art collaboration and circulation. This new way of production, collaboration, and distribution gave rise to the graphic language of poor images stemming from the technical processes in fax creation exchanges. These poor images had low resolution, distortion, degradation, visual noise, and image deterioration – elements that became part of the graphic language inherent to the machine’s media specificity. The main objective of this text is exploring collaborative strategies with fax machines to highlight the resulting graphic language, and their value in art and image circulation. It also aims to examine how collaboration was central, as both sender and receiver were needed in the process. For this purpose, the research draws mainly from original materials and the artistic fax collection held by the International Museum of Electrography - Center for Innovation in Art and New Technologies (MIDECIANT) in Cuenca, Spain, which was a pioneering center in new technologies during the 90’s, including fax practices.