|
encyclopaedia cinematographica
|
|
Project based on the international scientific filmarchive of all movements Encyclopaedia Cinematographica | |
Large Scale Video-Installation, 2001 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
|
||||
|
> Print this page > Download in text format |
Encyclopaedia cinematographica The international scientific film project Encyclopaedia Cinematographica was founded in the 1950s by the Institute for Scientific Film (IWF), Göttingen/Germany, under the auspices of Gotthard Wolf and the behaviorist Konrad Lorenz, among others. The archive comprises several thousand films, mostly of 2 minutes' duration and organized in a kind of matrix, which were intended to document the entire moving world. The moving world is subdivided into species and their specific spectrum of movements and systematically recorded. Here, film has been reduced to its very essence: the depiction of movement. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
KUNST-WERKE BERLIN present a new work of the Berlin artist Christoph Keller In the context of the exhibition series archives of images the Kunst-Werke Berlin e.V., Institute for Contemporary Art, presents the new work ENCYCLOPAEDIA CINEMATOGRAPHICA of the Berlin artist Christoph Keller. Christoph Keller has been investigating the world of archives for some time. Among others, he has explored the archive of medical films of the Berlin university hospital Charité (retrograd – a history of the medical films of the Charité Berlin), the film archive of the German Republic and the scientific film archive Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC). The perspective Christoph Keller takes in his works about these archives, differs on the one hand from their scientific concepts and yet incorporates them in other aspects. Scientific research and the process of archiving are closely related: what can be archived, is documentable, available and researchable ? the world is recorded in the archive and becomes reproducible. However, as a means to describe the world the archive expands the sum of its individual entries and opens the view for the things, which are beyond systematisation and reproduction. The archives dealt with by Christoph Keller lend themselves to an archaeological perspective and thus become themselves viewable as objects and monuments. The individual entries of an archive serve as a classification into prototypes and archetypes, which is closely connected to the technological aspect of the medium employed. The film, the key medium of the twentieth century, opened a new, wide area for archiving and thus for science: the moving world, hence nature and life themselves. Thanks to the cinematograph, movements became recordable, devisable, analysable and storable. 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 Gotthard Wolf and 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. The moving world has been subdivided in species and their specific spectrum of movements and systematically recorded. Film has been reduced to its very essence: the depiction of movement. 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. In addition the Kunst-Werke show two other works by Christoph Keller in the context of his concern with archives, the film retrograd – a History of the Medical Films of the Charité Berlin and the text/image work Archives As Objects As Monuments. |
||||
|
||||
