Minutes from Now
Nikolaus Gansterer / Simona Koch
2016
Artist Statement
The three channel video “Minutes from Now” is inspired by a fictive-ethnographic approach (Henri Michaux) and shifts into view space-time phenomena (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) in connection with socio-political repercussions of and on the planet's ecology in the early twenty-first century. Stunning footage of a journey from Vienna to Tokyo are poetically edited together and condensed to form a distinct "timescape". Intense polyrhythmic sound textures, disturbing scraps of conversation, and meaningful visual sequences deliberately dissolve common time constructions and open insight into the plural time-worlds of our Anthropocene. The video work shows a continuum, which is shaped by human activities of permanent renewal, construction and deconstruction, migration and hypermobility, acceleration and raging standstill, and their immanent fields of friction. Note: In this exhibition, only one of three channels is exhibited.
“Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.” says the physicist Archibald Wheeler. The motto Then-Now-After perfectly fits to the key question of the film submitted. What is the phenomenon of temporality and can we measure it? The title “Minutes from Now” refers, to the apparent im/measurability of time, and to the fragmentary notes and protocol-like moments that were captured while traveling between Europa and Asia. The footage of hundreds of hours of film material were rhythmically organized and re-composed to fragile micro-moments between image, sound and word.
Artist Bio
As artist and performer, Nikolaus Gansterer links drawing, thinking and action through a practice of performative visualisation and cartographic representations. Through a transmedial and transdisciplinary approach, he focuses on mapping processes of transience by developing experimental modes of notation and translation. Gansterer studied Anthropology at University of Vienna and Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria, he completed his cross-disciplinary studies at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Currently he is lecturing at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna where he was Guest Professor in 2016 - 2018.