Vienna-based artist Gebhard Sengmuller's 1990s multimedia installation TV Poetry represented a critical and constructive response to television's influence in the late twentieth century, aligning it with a dialectical construction of electronic media in Marxist media theory. The work falls within art historical, literary, and technological lineages of systems, media, and telecommunications art. In its reconfiguration of television's discursive codes and its incorporation of networked engagement, TV Poetry represented an ambivalent acknowledgement of the relationship between cultural consumption and attention, and the potential of software to disrupt the one-way transmissions of broadcast television. The second version of TV Poetry more explicitly engaged a context of communicational borderlessness and growing possibilities for newer media to reconfigure power relations via its simultaneous emphasis on and collapsing of the distances between information transmission and reception, and its disruption of experiences of time and place, real and virtual, watching and reading, and creation and consumption.