Herbert W. Franke
«Digital Einstein»

This picture series for superimposed projection was designed as the introduction for an event on digital visual art and music. It exists as one of the earliest examples of picture processing used for digital art. The successive crossover from recognizable portrait to abstract image, in which all meaning becomes indecipherable, points toward Einstein’s contribution to a new viewing of our world, whose vividness is then lost. Optically, the presentation is carried out with superimposed projections (accompanied by sound effects). The series was developed with the help of the picture processing system «Bildspeicher N,» («image storage N») used for making medical diagnoses (evaluation by scintigram) by the firm Siemens in Erlangen.
Today one can carry out the superimposition procedure with presentation programs and save it together with the acoustic background as an animation. In this form the series «Digitaler Einstein» (Digital Einstein) can be retrieved as an AVI file. Since the accompanying sound sequence used at that time is no longer available, the sound components were newly conceived by Jörg Stelkens using the soft synthesizer «CrusherX-Live!».