Encyclopaedia Cinematographica

From the 1st of September till the 11th of October, the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art will present the project "Encyclopaedia Cinematographica", an Installation by Christoph Keller, in the Aquarium. Screening hours of the installation: daily from sunset to midnight

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 ethnologist Konrad Lorenz. The past exhibitions 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 in the Aquarium in a form of a 2 channel video installation.

“The films of the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica are the purest form of scientific documentary film imaginable. They document ‘only’ the forms and series of motions of a wide variety of animals without any commentary, music or dramatic cuts. The films were intended to be an inventory of all the forms of animal motion existing on earth. Their limitation is the reality of the actual variety of species.” – Cord Riechelmann

In his installations frequently resembling experimental configurations, German artist Christoph Keller uses the discursive possibilities of art to investigate the themes of science and its utopias. He first studied mathematics, physics and hydrology, before continuing his studies at the art academy in Berlin and in Cologne. His works are present in many international exhibitions like the Lyon Biennial; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; MoMA PS1, New York. – www.christophkeller.net

Curated by Edit Molnár & Marcel Schwierin.