Sendeanstalt

A TV station is an invisible, tightly woven web of technology and editorial routine — the audience never gets to see it. Sendeanstalt ("broadcasting organization") gives that web a body.

A tower of retired broadcast machines works around the clock, assembling its own TV program from archive material. Professional videotape recorders from the 1980s cue, spool and play, always at the edge of technical failure, hurrying to get the next segment on air in time. The scaffolding that holds the tower together doubles as its antenna.

On the way to the fully digital universal machine, something got lost piece by piece — first the work with materials, mechanical or electronic, then the machines themselves, replaced by interfaces to distant, virtual computing. What remains are obsolete machines, relics of past decades. But obsolete also means freed from the duty to function. The old machines are open books, telling of the promises they once made.