outside view of the Fax You venue in the Academy Bookstore in central Helsinki

Helsinki - New York
New York - Helsinki
August 25, 1994
the Fax You project, sponsored by The Finnish Fund for Art Exchange and the Academy Bookstore, took place in the front window of the Academy Bookstore in Helsinki and the HERE Art center associated with the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater in New York City. One evening at the end of August is a special one in Helsinki called "The Night of The Arts" where there are a variety of cultural events, Fax You being one of them. I was invited to participate by Visa Norros, the artist organizing the Finnish end of the event. Visa is an old friend who I first met when he was a visiting lecturer at the Icelandic College of Art a few years back.Night of the Arts audience for Fax You are engaged and intrigued by the strange content filling up the windows of the Academy Bookstore in central Helsinki

Starting around 5 p.m., we established contact via fax and telephone with the folks New York and at 6 p.m. began the project with the first documented trans-Atlantic I CHING casting. (Well, as a late post-script here, I would defer this honor to a performance arranged by Roy Ascott for the Ars Electronica Biennale of 1982 where artists in a number of locations in the US and Wales were linked with terminals. They then did a casting which signified "CHU" or ""Difficulty at the Beginning"...) We, on the other hand, alternated cities for each consecutive cast of the three coins, generating the hexagram "The Power of the Great" which energized everyone during the next six hours of hectic activity. Some of the photos below done at the Helsinki end of the event show the situation as we worked in the windows of the Academic Bookstore.

In my view, one of the more important outcomes a project like this is the establishment of some kind of lasting connection -- else the electronic performance be simply an act of artistic spectacle.

Participants List

In the spring of 1995, I was back in Helsinki teaching, and with help from Visa and funding from FRAME, I produced a 200-page photocopy documentation in an edition of fifty from the incoming and outgoing works at the Helsinki end of the performance. It was distributed to all the participants as well as a number of pertinent archive sites around the world including the ArtPool Research center in Budapest and the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. If you are interested in a copy, please contact me -- I will pass one along for U$D 50.00 plus postage.

Curators: Julia Kauste (New York), Visa Norros (Helsinki)