Drawing A Hypothesis

Drawing a Hypothesis is an exciting reader on the ontology of forms of visualizations and on the development of the diagrammatic view and its use in contemporary art, science and theory. In an intense process of exchange with artists and scientists, Nikolaus Gansterer reveals drawing as a media of research enabling the emergence of new narratives and ideas by tracing the speculative potential of diagrams. Based on a discursive analysis of found figures with the artists' own diagrammatic maps and models, the invited authors create unique correlations between thinking and drawing. Due to its ability to mediate between perception and reflection, drawing proves to be one of the most basic instruments of scientific and artistic practice, and plays an essential role in the production and communication of knowledge. The book is a rich compendium of figures of thought, which moves from scientific representation through artistic interpretation and vice versa.

Nikolaus Gansterer, born in 1974, lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. He studied art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and completed his post-academic studies at the Jan van Eyck Academy at Maastricht in The Netherlands. He is cofounder of the Institute for transacoustic Research and currently lecturer at the Institute for Transmedia Art in the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He has an international performance and exhibition activity.
As an artist, Nikolaus Gansterer is deeply interested in the links between drawing, thinking and action. In his visual work, he focuses on mapping processes emerging out of cultural and scientific networks, unfolding their immanent structures of interconnectedness.
By rejecting a strict differentiation of these two areas, and through a consequent recombination of methods and settings from both fields, he arrives at distinct lines of connection and division, questioning the imaginary threshold between nature and culture, art and philosophy.
Nikolaus Gansterer’s fascination with the complex character of figures has led to his book Drawing a Hypothesis (Springer Wien/New York, 2011) on the ontology of shapes of visualizations and on the development of the diagrammatic view and its use in contemporary art, science and theory.