Artist review #6: Gebhard Sengmüller

Significance:
What first caught my attention were the light bulbs (the small appliance type, 2500 of them!) because of my sympathy for the low tech. The warm and dim light creates a special feeling, like a ritual. Is that engineering or art? We are looking at very conspicuous image transmitter employing the basics of TV. It reminds of Daniel Rozin Peg Mirror (2007). What I like about Sengmuller's work is its focus on revealing a process. All the 2500 cables are exposed and take a sculptural quality. In his work transferring image is obviously a divide more than connection, the device turns reality into abstraction. Can we talk like that about media in general?
Yet, many installations transforming sensitory experience have concept but without a big subject matter. For that reason some call them "science museum art". A good question when looking at media/interactive work - does it do anything beyond showing a process or effect?

Biography:
Gebhard Sengmüller is an artist who works in the field of media technology. He is currently based in Vienna, Austria. Since 1992, he has been developing projects and installations that focus on the history of electronic media, creating alternative ordering systems for media content, and constructing autogenerative networks. His work has been shown in Europe, the United States, and Japan, among others in venues such as the Ars Electronica, Linz; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Postmasters Gallery, New York City; and the ICC Center, Tokyo.

1) “A Parallel Image” is an electronic camera obscura. ... 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.
http://www.gebseng.com/08_a_parallel_image/

2) Black cube installation: A film sequence (35mm motion picture, 24 frames/sec.) is cut up and the individual frames are mounted as slides. They’re then distributed among 24 slide projectors that are all focused on the same screen (the exact same point).
Via electronic control of the projectors, these individual images are then reassembled-in an extremely cumbersome way-into a chronological sequence.
The formula “one projector per frame” thus gives rise to something that at least rudimentarily (and inevitably very inaccurately, due to the lack of precision of the mechanical devices) suggests a motion picture. The film soundtrack emerges as a byproduct - the mechanical clattering of the projectors changing slides.
http://www.gebseng.com/04_slidemovie/

Work:

Farm Animal Drawings video
Making of the Farm Animals Drawings

Interview:
Media art has already become something of a negative buzzword. The term can almost no longer be used, because every kind of art is actually media art. It has to be more precisely defined to refer to art with electronic media, or in my case with electromechanical media. You could call me a media artist, because I play with the medium and because I’m more concerned with the medium than the content.
http://www.gebseng.com/publications/artists_as_inventors_excerpt_sengmueller.pdf

Representation: http://www.fotosengmueller.com/
Did not find any galleries representing him. He has been sponsored by tech companies to do his work and is also a professional architecture photographer.

Web site: http://www.gebseng.com