Einstein Digital Series (1974)
Einstein Digital is one of Franke’s best-known works combining nine single picture processing photogrpahs as an edition.
The art work series of around 20 photographs from 1074 is one of the earliest examples of picture processing art. First, a black-and-white portrait of Albert Einstein was scanned and the resulting digital code was stored using a punched tape. The image data were then fed into a picture processing system, ‘Bildspeicher N’, – a medical diagnostic device in the research center of Siemens. The computer system was originally developed to convert scintigrams to optimize the visualization of the distribution of radioactive tracer substances in a patient’s body. But in this case, the scintigram was replaced by the digitized photograph of Einstein, which was displayed on the screen as a rough raster image. Then a variety of iterative picture processing methods were applied under visual control to satisfy the aesthetic criteria of Franke. Then the finalized images on screen was conventionally photographed as there was no tool to do a digital “screenshot” at that time.
In this artistic process, the content of the image becomes increasingly abstract and simplified to the point of complete dissolution. Thus, Herbert W. Franke gives expression to a consequence of Einstein’s theory of relativity, namely the dissolution of our seemingly concrete, visible world into an abstract space-time continuum. To create the images,
Franke used a method he often employed, that is, the appropriation of the instruments of science, technology and medicine for the purposes of aesthetic design.
Photographs were taken directly from the screen and shown in exhibitions in the form of single enlargements. Other well-known works from the series include representations in which nine or twelve images were grouped together in a matrix arrangement and reproduced as offset prints. The digital Einstein is one of Franke’s most famous works, which was featured in many publications.
Additionally, several presentations of the work at exhibitions and conferences utilised cross-fading projection, for which Jörg Stelkens of Munich composed a musical sequence on the computer in the 1990s.
The series was created using the Siemens computer ‘Bildspeicher N’, a digital picture processing system developed by Hans-Jürgen van Kranenbrock and Helmut Schenk for medical diagnostics at the Siemens-Reiniger-Werke für Medizintechnik in Erlangen.