Fax art is art specifically designed to be sent or transmitted by a facsimile machine, where the "fax art" is the received "fax". It is also called telecommunications art or telematic art.[1] According to art historians Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark, "Fax art was another means of mediating distances".[2]
Fax art was first transmitted in 1980, but that was not documented until 1985.[2] On January 12, 1985, Joseph Beuys together with Andy Warhol and the Japanese artist Kaii Higashiyama participated in the "Global-Art-Fusion" project, a fax art project initiated by the conceptual artist Ueli Fuchser, in which a fax was sent with drawings of all three artists within 32 minutes around the world – from Düsseldorf (Germany) via New York (US) to Tokyo (Japan), received at Vienna's Palais Liechtenstein Museum of Modern Art. This fax was a statement of peace during the Cold War in the 1980s.[3] The earliest scholarly note of fax art in art history was in 1990 by Karen O'Rourke.[4]