Forelesning

Forum Dans #11 Nicolaus Gansterer: Sensing Agencies on Shaken Grounds

Both projects examine non-human forces and explore how artistic practices can engage with dynamic environments, shifting temporalities, and states of instability in times of ecological and planetary crisis.

Contingent Agencies investigates atmospheric forces – such as moods, ambiences, and weather – and their role in shaping sensitive ecosystems on micro and macro scales. Gansterer will present the short film Sensing Contingent Agencies alongside the related publication. The project traces subtle interactions between light and shadow, plants and insects, wind, water, and climate, developing a cinematic and performative approach attuned to barely perceptible agencies. 

Shaken Grounds, organized as a research collective with diverse performative approaches, addresses anthropogenic disturbances and seismic forces in the context of the Anthropocene. Bringing together geological processes and political conditions, the project reflects on crisis, trauma, and instability as both material and social phenomena. It asks which practices of seismography and which performative forms can be cultivated to live and act with ongoing tremors across geological timescales, ontological states of vulnerability, and precarious presences.

Across both projects, Gansterer reflects on drawing, movement, and experimental notation as modes of moving-thinking-feeling with complex forces and relational environments, raising ontological questions of coexistence, agency, and presence. The lecture invites the audience into an open dialogue on artistic research as a situated and performative practice.

Nikolaus Gansterer

Nikolaus Gansterer is an artist, performer, and researcher whose practice investigates the entanglements of drawing, thinking, and acting. Working across installations, performances, and transmedial formats, he explores how processes of perception can be translated into artistic and spatial constellations. His work is particularly concerned with diagrammatic practices that render ephemeral and emergent processes visible, while critically examining the conceptual boundaries between nature and culture, as well as between art and philosophy.

Gansterer has been teaching at the University of Applied Arts Vienna since 2007 and is a board member of the Applied Performance Laboratory. He is the author of Drawing a Hypothesis (Springer, 2013), which addresses the ontology of diagrammatic configurations. Between 2014 and 2018, he developed experimental systems of notation linking drawing, writing, and choreography within the interdisciplinary research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (De Gruyter, 2017). From 2019 to 2025, he served as lead researcher of the artistic research project Contingent Agencies (Hatje Cantz, 2025), focusing on the experimental diagramming of atmospheres and environments, which resulted in a comprehensive publication. Gansterer is also co-author of Playing with Ludwig / Jouer avec Ludwig (Dilecta, 2022) and the Atlas of Spatial Figures (Jovis, 2025). His work has been presented internationally through exhibitions, performances, and collaborative projects.

https://www.gansterer.org
https://contingentagencies.uni-ak.ac.at/
https://shaken-grounds.org

Forum Dans is arranged by the Academy of Dance at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO). The forum seeks to open up and expand the space for debate and dialogue regarding relevant issues and topics within the field of dance.