A World Where Serial Visual Data Transmission Never Existed

That’s the vision behind Gebhard Sengmüller’s art installation entitled “A Parallel Image.” Starting with the work of French engineer Maurice Leblanc in 1880, moving images were transmittable electrically by breaking them down into single frames, and then frames into individual pixels. This is how broadcast and cable television developed. Sengmüller writes:

“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 superfluous².

Technical details follow at the link. And in the video, there’s a Betty Boop cartoon about 1:30 in.

Link via Gizmodo | Gallery of the Installation