Figuring Notions of Notation

In this workshop, visual artist and performer Nikolaus Gansterer (Vienna) will share insights into his performative practices. Together, we will explore the fundamental choreographies of artistic sense-making based on two recent artistic research projects: Choreo-graphic Figures and Contingent Agencies. He will introduce various practices of notating atmospheres through writing, diagramming, expanded drawing, and embodied forms of subjective mapping. Gansterer understands the processes of thinking and note taking as deeply intertwined. He questions how thought processes can be translated into dynamic signs without fixing what is fluid and contingent? What systems of notation can be developed to articulate the micro-movements at the cusp of awareness within the process of noticing?

Through transformations from idea to sign, from word to image, from trace to figure, and from material to action, practices of notation and reflection towards tactics of showing and sharing are invented and experienced individually and collectively. The aim is to raise awareness of the qualitative characteristics of thinking in motion and to disclose spaces, situations, atmospheres with particular focus on non-human agencies.

About the Artist

As an artist, performer and researcher Gansterer is interested in the links between drawing, thinking, and action. cross forms of installations and performances he traces the translatability of phenomena of perception into an artistic environment. In his transmedial work, he focuses on diagraming ephemeral and emergent processes unfolding their immanent structures of interconnectedness, questioning the imaginary threshold between nature and culture, art and philosophy. Since 2007 he is teaching at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna where he is board member of the Applied Performance Laboratory. He is author of the book Drawing a Hypothesis (2013) on the ontology of diagrammatic configurations. 2014-2018 he was developing new systems of notation between drawing, writing, and choreography within the interdisciplinary research project Choreo-graphic Figures Deviations from The Line. 2019-2024 he is leading key researcher of the artistic project Contingent Agencies for experimental diagramming of atmospheres and environments.

https://www.gansterer.org