Faxinatie André Thijssen & Hans Wolf

FaxinatieAndré Thijssen & Hans Wolf

FaxinatieAndré Thijssen & Hans Wolf

These days, the fax machine is resting in peace in the churchyard of nostalgic technology.
Just imagine: it’s 1992…
For more than six years, paper spewed out of the machine. Between February 1992 and April 1999, Hans Wolf and André Thijssen faxed each other almost daily. They shared and duplicated their fascination for the puzzling, curious image. The image that was always more a question mark than an exclamation mark. Day in, day out, they played with expectations, thumbing their noses at the decoders, the sifters, the clarifiers of meaning. Of their extensive fax correspondence, 4030 A4 sheets have been preserved. For this book, they selected 634 sheets from a metre and a half of folders. Saved from the claws of oblivion, the ink not yet faded.
For more than six years, their exchanges formed a continual motivation to discover images that are out of kilter and wrong-foot viewers. A quarter of a century after the start of their fax correspondence, Hans Wolf and André Thijssen have opened the archives and compiled snippets from their exchange of images in a book. We talk to the faxers, in summer 2017, on Binnenkadijk in Amsterdam. ‘For a long time, we thought it was a private chat. Too obscure for others.’
Authors: André Thijssen & Hans Wolf
Design: Sabine Verschueren
Publisher: Fringe Phenomena
Book presentation