In 1992, W. J. T. Mitchell proclaimed the Pictorial Turn. In 2020, he diagnosed our present moment with “a certain pathology that has now become endemic in the era of Google Images”: “iconomania” — or more precisely, “atlas fever.” This fever manifests in an obsession with visual databases that claim to comprehensively capture, organize, and make knowledge accessible. Atlas fever has historical precedents. One of them is the central focus of Visualpedia: the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC), an international large-scale research project in film with extraordinary scope and longevity, officially active from 1952 to 1990. The EC was part of the Institute for Scientific Film in Göttingen (IWF) and was devoted to the large-scale production, collection, and distribution of films for scientific use. Its aim was to create an encyclopedia of filmed movements in the fields of biology, ethnology, and the technical sciences. By the end of the project, the EC comprised over three thousand films made by hundreds of scientists. These films were widely circulated and distributed internationally.

To this day, EC films remain popular as found footage material in both scientific and artistic contexts. In 2010, the IWF was dissolved, and the collection was transferred to the TIB – the German National Library of Science and Technology in Hanover, which is currently digitizing the material and making much of it accessible online. This digital publication brings new challenges, often related to the films’ provenance, authorship, or content. Central questions arise: What can be shown? What may circulate? And who is allowed to see the films — and who is not?

The Visualpedia project sets out to reconstruct the history of the EC and to critically examine the current state of the collection in the digital sphere. The overarching research question is how to respond to atlas fever — that is, the obsession with and fascination for large-scale visual collections and their systematization — using theEncyclopaedia Cinematographica as a case study, while taking into account the epistemic, media-historical, and political conditions that shape it. More broadly, Visualpedia aims to contribute to the development of Visual Science and Technology Studies (Visual STS). Within this framework, a hybrid reader titled Visual STS is currently in preparation, in collaboration with Intercom.

Visualpedia consists of two subprojects: The first aims to provide a thorough, historically and methodologically grounded analysis of the EC’s history and archive, thereby establishing a solid foundation for future work by researchers and artists. Building on this, the second, more practice-oriented subproject explores how this sometimes “sensitive collection” — one that is both tremendum and fascinosum in scope and content — can be thoughtfully activated for research and public engagement. As a contribution to the Critical Digital Humanities, various experimental interfaces are being developed. Two of these interfaces, E-EC Index and E-EC Shuffle were awarded the Neu-Whitrow Prize by the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in 2025.

In 2024/2025, the exhibition Fadenspiele/String Figures. A Research Exhibition, developed within the project, was shown at Museum Tinguely in Basel. Among other aspects, it focused on the ethnological section of the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica.

Project Lead:
Sarine Waltenspül

Team Members:
Moritz Greiner-Petter, Artistic-Scientific Associate / Design
Mario Schulze, Postdoctoral Researcher / Curator

Collaborating Partners:
Mareile Flitsch, Ethnographic Museum Zurich
Oliver Gaycken, University of Maryland
Mathias Grote, University of Greifswald
Anke te Heesen, Humboldt University of Berlin
Estelle Blaschke, University of Basel
Andres Pardey, Museum Tinguely Basel
Maja Roth, Braunschweig University of Arts
Anja Sattelmacher, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf
Felix Sattler, Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin / Knowledge Lab, University of Bonn

Former Team Members:
Seraina Dür, Jonas Gillmann, Ute Sengebusch