Fax 69
The fax machine was the perfect intermediary between the analogue and digital world, providing a beautiful way to send hand written letters immediately to any destination in the world, encoding them digitally and then re printing them at the receivers machine. In the 1990s i used a fax machine constantly for sending text and drawings by telephone. On one occasion the fax was quite long and started to scroll back into the machine by accident.
Fax 69 brings together two fax machines side by side (originally placed one on top of the other) allowing the printout from the ‘receiving’ machine to be fed back into the ‘sending’ machine. Each machine is connected to the telephone exchange with its own unique phone number enabling the sending machine to call the receiver and send the initial fax document which is a blank sheet of paper. There is no actual (useful) information within this closed loop however small discrepancies, dust, electronic interference etc become recorded and over the course of several hours starts to slowly build up eventually turning the paper almost completely black. The information loop is created half by the physical paper roll and half by the digital telephone connection.
Tokyo 1999
Fax 69 experimental prototype Berlin studio 1998