Christiane Baumgartner

In this print, Christiane Baumgartner combines woodcut—one of the oldest techniques for reproducing visual media—with more recent media technologies, in this case, video images of World War II warplanes. To make these prints, Baumgartner took photographs of her television screen, pasted the scaled-up images onto large planks of wood, then carved the image in relief. Note that she captured both the image itself and traces of its original media format: horizontal bands characteristic of older-style television screens compete for our attention against the vapor trails of the airplanes. 

To learn more about Baumgartner’s prints, read scholar Gerry Beegan’s Object Lesson in Manual 20.