Elastic Fax II
1994
An event-installation-movie by Eduardo Kac
Elastic Fax II was realized in 1994 between the Intenet, the telephone network, and the Center for Contemporary Art, at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, as part of Kac's solo show "Dialogues".
Artists around the world were invited through the Internet to transmit sequential images, to form by chance the sequences of a self-organizing fax movie. The fax machine was placed above eye level, to create the feeling of a large projector as the images went by. It also created the feeling of a waterfall, with the images forming wavy patters as they hit the floor. As the piece evolved, viewers could explore the sequential images in any order by handling them. This project started as a process, with images arriving throughout the show. Once the fax roll was used up, the fax machine was turned off, and the piece became an installation. At the end of the show, the images were scanned in the order received, compiled into a movie, and placed back here, on the Internet, where the project started.