“A Parallel Image” is an electronic camera obscura. This media-archaeological, interactive sculpture is based on the fictive assumption that the currently still valid principle of electronically transmitting moving images, namely by breaking them down into single images and image lines, was never discovered. The result is an apparatus that attempts a highly elaborate parallel transmission of every single pixel from sender to receiver. This is only possible by connecting camera and monitor using about 2,500 cables. Unlike conventional electronic image transmission procedures, “A Parallel Image” is technologically completely transparent, conveying to the viewer a correspondence between real world and transmission that can be sensually experienced.


In 1880 the French engineer Maurice Leblanc defined for the first time the principle for transmitting images with electricity, which is still valid today.
The basis for this was the idea that an image to be transmitted is broken down into lines; the light impulses are transformed into electrical currents; the sender and receiver of the image must be synchronized; the transmitted electric signals are ultimately transposed into light values on a screen again; and that the picture lines are then recomposed synchronously in time.
The breakdown of images already proposed at that time first became practically possible with the conception of the Nipkow disk by Paul Nipkow in 1883. This was successfully employed for the first time in 1926 by the Scotsman John Logie Baird in an electromechanical television system, the Televisor.
Electronic television, in its form that has remained largely unchanged up to the early 21st century, first presented in 1928 by Philo T. Farnsworth and later commercially standardized by Vladimir Zworykin at RCA, is also based on this principle idea of breaking down images into image lines and the therefore requisite time synchronization between sender and receiver.
This way of chopping up moving images into frames, fields and lines is one of the most universal and powerful continuities in the development of electronic image media. This kind of image transmission can be called serial, because a coaxial cable or radio channel suffices to transmit the image signal from the sender to the receiver.
“A Parallel Image” starts from the assumption that the development just described never happened. Would the absence of the idea of breaking down an image into lines have led to the lack of a procedure for live transmission any time soon? Or would the desire of our technological civilization to have an immediate transmission medium have been so great that a completely different, more complicated way would have been accepted?
With this claim I attempt to develop a television format that is useless in its efficiency, but nevertheless technically entirely feasible. My format chooses a parallel transmission of every single pixel, which makes a technically elaborate synchronization in time between sender and receiver superfluous. To this end, I will design an apparatus that links every pixel on the “camera” side with every pixel on the “monitor” side in the technically simplest way possible. Taking this idea to its logical conclusion, this leads to an absurd system that connects a grid of 2500 photoconductors on the sender side with 2500 small light bulbs on the receiver side, pixel by pixel, using a total of 2500 copper wires. This results in a relatively gigantic unit consisting of camera, transmission route and monitor, which in its sheer size, complexity and power consumption recalls the mainframes of the early 1940s or old-fashioned electro-mechanical telephone switching centers (telephone exchanges). Unlike familiar serial image transmission, the technology of “A Parallel Image” is completely transparent even to the lay viewer. An object held in front of the “camera” side of the installation appears as a shadow outline on the “monitor” side. The signal path can be followed simply by tracing the wires from each photoconductor to each light bulb.
The resultant medium has an experiential quality that would be more probably attributed to film. Like film, and contrary to the conventional television system, there is a correspondence here between the real world and the transmission that can be sensually experienced. The television image is imbued with the directness of a film frame without the coding that normally takes place in the transmission of a television signal and does not allow for an easily comprehensible connection between the base image and the recorded signal (e.g. on video tape). In its directness “A Parallel Image” is a radically new live medium that returns the visibility and comprehensibility of the process to electronic image transmission.
Unlike most media systems today, a direct experience is possible with “A Parallel Image”. Visitors can intervene directly in this interactive sculpture: the outlines of their bodies appear without delay on the monitor. It is possible to play with this image by changing the distance to the camera, etc. Swivelling the photo lens (or projecting a film onto the camera surface) also makes it possible to render bodies and objects in their gradations of brightness and their plasticity. The starkly reduced resolution of this camera obscura leads at the same time to an image that clearly indicates the process it is based on in its quality.

An Parallel Image is an installation by Gebhard Sengmüller , in collaboration with Franz Büchinger, supported by Fels-Multiprint, Vienna

Start/Vernissage: Fr. September 18th 2009 at 19:00
till end of Schmiede09 (Sept 26th)
Dynamoraum, Pernerinsel, Hallein

A Parallel Image is the Winner of  Salzburger Landespreis 2008: Medienkuns

pictures from the "A Parallel Image" promotional brochure (images)

promotional brochure (pdf)
catalog text (pdf)
Website Gebhard Sengmüller

supported by:



This media-historical artwork, which treats the "printed circuit board" topic in an unusual way, was supported by Fels-Multiprint, Vienna. Fels-Multiprint, a leader in PCB fabrication and assembly was founded in 1884 as a precision engineering company. Since 1964 Fels-Multiprint has been producing printed circuit boards. The product range has been continuously broadened with new technologies like multilayer PCBs, flexible PCBs, PCBs from ceramic materials for high tech applications (medical and space technology) or SMD placement equipment. Putting a high value on sustainability, Fels-Multiprint has been offering lead-free fabrication since 2004 and was certified eco-friendly nine times since 2000. It was also recipient of the Austrian National Enivironmental Prize as well as the European EMAS prize. Fels-Multiprint promotes industry and science by supporting projects and diploma theses in technical colleges and universities of applied sciences.



All files are copyright © 2008 by Gebhard Sengmüller, installation rendering copyright © 2008 by Michael Günther. Permission to publish is contingent upon proper published attribution to "A Parallel Image" and the subsequent receipt by Gebhard Sengmüller of a copy of the published material. In the case of special requests or problems, please e-mail us at gebseng{at}vinylvideo.com


back to -> Schmiede09: AUFBRUCH Program