Visualpedia

The Index is a comprehensive, visual catalog of all known EC entries, in which the EC is presented as a cohesive collection for the first time. The Index’s dataset is based on the publicly available metadata from the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB). Entries are arranged in a scalable grid and include basic metadata for each film, as well as preview images, if available, and links to the original entries in the library catalog. Roughly a third of the films in the collection have digitized videos available to watch online. The collection also includes a number of entries that we found through further research and that are not cataloged in the library database. These entries are shown as black squares and highlight the inconsistencies of digital archives. Various sorting, filtering, and search options, as well as display settings and a search function, allow users to further examine the entries in the Index.

Small icons indicate the copyright status of the films and their accessibility in the library catalog. Together with the preview images — or their absence — these markers provide insight into the often complicated copyright situation surrounding the films and the library’s partially ambiguous access policies. Thus, the E‑EC Index serves not only as a research interface for the historical collection itself but also as a subtle mapping of the library’s digitization politics and the continued history of the EC collection as a digital archive today.

As a complement to the Index’s comprehensive but distant overview of the EC, E‑EC Shuffle offers a more serendipitous encounter with the individual films — a deliberately unsystematic look from within the material. Here, short excerpts from two randomly selected films from the collection play side by side. In alternating fashion, a new film is selected every few seconds. This random sampling allows the individual films to come into view, even if only briefly. It enables one to examine film themes, aesthetics, and techniques more closely across the hundreds of hours of material contained in the EC.

Another purpose of the interface is to examine the effects of viewing the films in a parallel configuration. The parallel projection of the films is one of the historically intended methods of presentation. Projector setups in the IWF screening rooms in Göttingen made such simultaneous viewing possible. In this respect, the E‑EC Shuffle can be understood as an experimental reenactment to investigate the media-aesthetic effects of different viewing modes.

Due to licensing restrictions, the E‑EC Shuffle only includes films with a Creative Commons license, accounting for approximately twenty percent of the collection. This mostly excludes films from the non-European ethnological section and creates a skewed impression of the EC’s contents, which are dominated by scenes of animals, European crafts, and customs.

The selected films depict the machining of various types of steel and other similar materials. Each film focuses on one material and shows how variations in cutting parameters affect the outcome. These films are notable for their striking aesthetics and for being among the most cinematographically consistent in the collection. Particular attention was paid during filming, editing, and technical execution to create highly standardized films that are nearly identical in their visual language, framing, and shot duration. These films fulfill the ambitions of an encyclopedic film in an idealized form due to their uniformity and comparability. Presenting the films in parallel makes their visual and conceptual rigor particularly evident. Therefore, the interfaces can act as visual arguments that highlight the aesthetic tendencies and ideals underpinning the EC. The technical films may have implicitly served as an ideal for the EC as a whole, particularly given founder Gotthard Wolf’s background in engineering and military research during World War II.

The ethnology section of the EC holds a small collection of films on string figure practices. Most of the films were filmed in the 1960s in various locations, including Brazil, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Greenland, and Switzerland. The films feature local string figure performers presenting individual figures to the camera. Intertitles with the names of the performed figures separate the performances. Despite their notable differences, the films are surprisingly similar in their filmic structure and visual language. In particular, the string figure films meet all three of the guiding criteria for inclusion in the EC collection: making movements — in this case, cultural practices — visible, comparable, and “conserving” them through film. The string figure films represent the collection's wider encyclopedic and systematic ambitions, as well as how these ambitions are reflected in the ethnological section of the EC.

For the E‑EC String Figures, individual scenes from the original films were manually extracted and arranged as separate clips. In this parallel view, the films can be experienced as a thematic series, which is not possible with the original organization of the EC collection. The clips are arranged in six visually distinct clusters, each featuring a specific location and cast of string figure performers. A larger grid field in each cluster highlights and plays back all of its corresponding clips, one after the other. Captions below indicate the names and locations of the current performers.

This assemblage of film scenes highlights their aesthetic similarities and shared scientific gaze. In a sense, it caters to and reproduces the collection’s core aspiration: to achieve a comparative view of all cultural practices through film. At the same time, E‑EC String Figures might be able to render this embedded agenda more clearly visible and expose it to closer examination. The video display aims to destabilize the authority and structural boundaries of the EC by omitting the racially coded film titles. The E-number, a prominent identifier for all films in the EC collection, is also omitted. The names of the featured performers are added in an attempt to restore traces of the films’ and performers’ provenance and history, as these names are not included in the original films. This reframing undermines the encyclopedic indexicality and coherence of the films, allowing for a different engagement with the depicted cultural practices and the films' media aesthetics.

The E‑EC String Figures was developed specifically for the exhibition String Figures / Fadenspiele. A Research Exhibition at the Museum Tinguely Basel from November 2024 to March 2025. It was presented alongside the E‑EC Index and in-depth case studies of the provenance of selected string figure films.

According to Gotthard Wolf, the founder of the EC, the organization of the collection followed an “encyclopedia scheme,” which is often illustrated using the biology section as an example. In this conceptual matrix, animal species are arranged horizontally and types of movement are arranged vertically. Films could be placed in this matrix according to the animals and behaviors depicted. In theory, then, each column in the scheme would cover the “movement inventory” of a particular species, with comparable behaviors of species across each row.

The E‑EC Schema interface recreates this conceptual model as an interactive visualization, incorporating nearly all of the existing films from the biology section of the EC. To accomplish this, the collection was manually reorganized based on the available metadata in the online dataset. The resulting interface allows users to reorder animal species by the number of films they are featured in and zoom out to see the distribution of films across the entire biology section.

The aim of this visual analysis is not merely to realize Gotthard Wolf’s encyclopedic vision. Rather, the historical conception of the EC can be examined in a sense of an experimental history of science. The self-proclaimed logic of the collection is cross-referenced with the material that was actually produced. For instance, the visualization shows that the biology section remained extremely fragmented until the end of the EC. For the vast majority of animal species, only a handful of films were produced, and hardly any species comes close to achieving the stated aim of a complete record of its movement inventory. This incompleteness is not apparent in any of the other interfaces or visualizations. Thus, while the claims of order, completeness, and comparability remain largely rhetorical, the interface explores the conceptual scheme’s potential as a visual organizing principle.