A Parallel Image (image above, video below), an installation by Gebhard Sengmueller and Franz Buechinger, is an electronic camera obscura which digitises an image and simultaneously transmits all elements to a location.

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.

Previous work by Gebhard Sengmueller includes TV Poetry. Originally seen on the Nettime mailing list.