1.1 Documentation of movement (2006)
creator(s) Reinhard Bek (conservator), Christian Lindhorst (independent conservator)
contributor(s) Josef Imhof (artist's assistant), Anja Hummel



Artists of kinetic artworks set their works in motion. They rotate, leap, or roll—calmly, quietly, sublimely, or quickly—and produce noises in the process. Such ephemeral forms of expression produced by movement are problematic from the point of view of conservation: wear and damage to the motors result. In addition to questions of the ethics of restoration in practice, the most important task for a conservator is to document the movements and materials of a work as early as possible.

An essay on documenting kinetic works is available as a download:
Introduction to the Documentation of Kinetic Art (pdf in German).
Photographic methods—film and computer-aided 3-D video analyses—are particularly well suited to documenting moving artworks.For that reason, as part of the project Inside Installations works were produced that specifically concern photographic methods and 3-D video analysis: Photographic Procedures for Documenting the Movements of Kinetic Objects Modified photographic methods such as cyclography and chronophotography are well suited to analyzing the size of movements. Developed toward the end of the nineteenth century for physiological studies of humans and animals, they are still useful today as methods for analyzing and documenting motion because they are simple to produce, have a format that can be read visually, record a great deal of information, and lend themselves well to additional processing.

This study is available for download: ‘Photographic Documentation of Movement’ (pdf in English and German).
The procedure, in which a moving object is recorded by two video cameras simultaneously from two different angles is the only method for objectively documenting a moving object in space over time. In other words, an object is recorded with the aid of three spatial coordinates in time.
This method is explained in the download ‘3-D Video Analysis’ (pdf in English and German)

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