 |
Iain Baxter& |
| project: Telex project |
|
Trans VSI Connection, 1969 |
|
| Iain
Baxter was already exploiting communications technologies
in the 1960s, creating several works “remotely” via
telex, telephone and telecopier. In 1969 he produced
an ambitious creative experiment in collaboration
with the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
From Vancouver, Baxter& transmitted guidelines
via telecopier to his collaborators in Halifax,
who produced corresponding environmental interventions;
e.g., the image on a postcard superimposed over
the real scene it depicted, which was then rephotographed
and retransmitted; a photograph of the precise geographic
centre of Halifax, located using a survey map of
the city; and documentation of a block of salt dissolving
in a rising tide. As Richard Cavell notes in
McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (University
of Toronto Pr, 2003), these kinds of intervention
challenged the concept of space: for Baxter&,
space no longer appeared locatable or delineated
by borders, but was constituted via relationships. |
 |
|
| |
|
