“A Parallel Image”: a novel way of transmitting a video signal

“A Parallel Image”: a novel way of transmitting a video signal

What you’re looking at is an installation by Gebhard Sengmüller called “A Parallel Image.” Technically, it’s art, but it’s more of an interesting deconstruction of technology than anything else. Instead of transmitting a video signal digitally via HDMI or VGA, this contraption does it in analog: 2500 photoconductors in an array, individually wired to 2500 bulbs on the other side. The result is that anything shone on one side appears on the other by a simple and entirely physical process.



It’s ridiculously inefficient in one way, yet almost as elegant as possible in another. And as you can imagine, it’s not very high resolution. 2500=50 x 50, so it’s got about the same amount of pixels as an area the size of a quarter on whatever screen you’re reading this on. Not something I’d want to read blogs with, but it does transmit that projector image pretty well.


“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.