CONCEPTS/ACCESS/COMMUNICATION AND IMAGERY
The fax medium is direct and immediate, allowing for spontaneous transmission of ideas on a worldwide basis without any interference. In a fax-out we can rearrange, distort and improvise recorded reality as well as transcend censorship and cultural and international boundaries. Since media constructs reality, the fax interchange is an exchange of various views of reality, unravelling input and reconnecting it to output. Fax is a new technology for a duty-free and boundary-free art and represents the abolition of time and place, as well as the fusion of near and far. In the fax transaction artists can interact spontaneously with one another in real time while simultaneously delivering statements and visuals across the globe. Concepts of time, information and geography are altered. Participants are both actors and spectators on the stage of life, promoting chance combinations of both intimate and anonymous interchanges or inserting subversive messages into the "inbetween". Is there such a thing as electrosensibility? Can this technology humanize, digitize and interface to fuse new dialogs and create new geographies?
Limitations to electronic access (either availability of equipment or money) in many countries is still a barrier to artists seeking worldwide exchanges. This directly affects the type of fax project, its duration and interaction. White fax is the most user friendly and democratic system of electronic visual exchange within the range of artists work with telecommuications it still requires money to network and be truly interactive in real time. Paradoxically it is elitist and democratic at the same time: while it is easily accessible it tends to appeal mainly to those who are conceptually based. Fax transmissions work best when there is an allocated fax line, but many artists cannot afford a separate line for their fax and another for their phone. This results in awkward and slow transactions where one often ends up making an international phone call as well as trying to transmit a fax!
Information judo in cyberspace? Alvin Toffler (in his book "Powershift") notes that the ease of duplicating information is making spies and pirates of us all. The free flow of information and ideas is inherently subversive and consequently of great appeal to the artist community. Fax transported art is still in its infancy and many technical problems exist: many fax projects are not truly interactive but are largely one-time events with no follow-up or connections between transmitters; there is not yet a flowing dialog between pictures, ideas and participants. In order to be used to its full potential, fax should not be restricted to straight transmissions but should be used to produce aesthetic events that convey a living electronic reality that is not just limited to reproducing images. Culture depends on community and community depends on interaction, with time and ideas being the ingredients that provide change, where communication is the result of a previous connection.

The most effective images are those that exploit black and white graphic qualities. Fax has a reductive tendency, does not like grey areas, and eliminates nuanced and subtle images. One needs to search for the special properties of fax art. The limitations of aesthetically satisfying fax images either forces one to search for other conceptual interchanges, or to capitalize on the rawness of the visuals as part of the concept. Fax images can be used to build sequences, mosaics or sketches: these have a directness and freshness that is part of the fax vocabulary.