Utilizing sensor technology, Hubert Kaufmann’s photographic series, we might at first glance mistake artworks in the century of their technical reproducibility. On the contrary, they are the most fitting definition of works of art during the period of the repetition of (im)possible probabilities—a conceptual realm of the conjunction of technology and the emerging or already realized image content. The conflict of this idea is the basis of Kaufmann’s photographic practice and the most critical system of his work: constant replays of history, where from the broadest thematic concerns he carefully shifts into consciously detailed visual representations.

The first step Kaufmann takes to make his works is making him a “skeleteur” where he takes apart his digital camera, removes the sensor and then places it back, making the camera to see only certain sections; he then takes the picture by scanning its surroundings repeatedly. The process results in images where visual noise dominates—areas of color saturation and pixels eruption—those are the RAW files that are actually more than just representations of their surroundings or color compositions that are alluring.

These sensor-based works are said to be more suitable to be called conceptual references to the past, the present, and—not the expected way—the dark forest – related futuropean in spite of their lively coloration. The paradox comes from the fact that hedges images away in a dark space, a virtual void, and brings them to a picture of a Big Bang or nuclear catastrophes at the very time. One is the emblem of creation, the other the tool of destruction. It is obvious that these things that are against each other in one unity are not coincidental. Both things, as opposites, are made through the processes of repetition and reproducibility. New sensors come with refueled abstracted virtual data realities, once more once more “skeltonized”—the chromatic outcome invariably varies, however, nothing changes in reality. And that is because it is both evidently and inevitably so, it is and will be the one that continues to persist.

Marko Zink, 2025