Frank Serge Lehmann's artistic preoccupations center around forms of communication, storytelling, and cross-cultural affective transmissions.

His work an ongoing project composed of a multitude of autonomous interdisciplinary installation-based works that combine advanced digital with mechanical technology, vernacular sociology, film, sound and statistics to create an artistic response. How globalization affects us, in even the most intimate of ways, is the subtext in all of the installations in the project. The apparatuses used by Lehmann belong to the past - they are old slot-machines from the 50s and 60s that he collects, but that he is certain still exist in enough numbers on the market to not endanger their indexing. They are brought into the present with complex computer systems that display on small digital screens, accompanied by recitations by professional actors, the outcomes of the artist's research. Each machine carries within it its personal story, the story of the people that owned it before, took care of it or discarded it. It itself communicates in subtle ways, through its model and make, condition, and function, about the possible context in which it was first used and its life thereafter. These machines are then repurposed to house new stories, without eliminating the original ones, thus bridging the past and the present, and illustrating the artist's thesis of the universality of communication.

Text by Olga Stefan