Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (2001)

Overview

The international scientific film project Encyclopaedia Cinematographica has been founded in the 1950s by the Institute for Scientific Film (IWF), Göttingen/Germany, instigated a. o. by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz. The archive comprises several thousand films, mostly of 2 minutes duration and organised in a kind of matrix, which were supposed to document the entire moving world. Christoph Keller pushes the idea of the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica further. He selected 40 entries and isolated their smallest possible sequence of movement, creating new cycles of movements arranged in 40 loops. The videos of the endlessly moving animals are presented on 40 monitors in the exhibition hall of the Kunst-Werke, which thus becomes a kind of walk-in archive. Keller’s work alludes to the idea of the archive as museum.