The human fax machine experiment

The Human Fax Machine draws together two sets of codes – the formality of machine instructions and the much looser codes of human group interaction. As an introduction to the computational mind-set, participants are set the task of devising some means of communicating an image from one group of people to another with simple sound signals. They may have only a wooden rattle, a container of shells or two forks that they can clang together, but they must somehow transmit the image across a small visual barrier to other members of their group so that the latter can reproduce it on butcher’s paper with marker pens.