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Drawing Epistemic Relations or How to Practice Material Entanglements of Text and Space [WORKSHOP]


Elena Peytchinska, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Thomas Ballhausen, University of Applied Arts Vienna

 

 

Throughout our artistic and artistic-research collaboration, we explored a manifold of strategies to materially intertwine the practices of writing and spacing/staging. In this context, the medium (and especially the practice) of drawing emerged as the link, the concrete articulation of the relation between and material entanglement of text and space.

 

Particularly, in our monographs Fauna, Flora and Fiction Fiction (De Gruyter, 2018, 2020, 2023; https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-exposition?exposition=2010919), we address aspects of speculative animal taxonomies, information theory, and spatiality of storytelling by practising them as material entanglements of text and space. These material entanglements articulate themselves (or are readable) across and along a series of drawings.

 

In our practice, drawing is simultaneously an epistemological tool (or an exploratory instrument in the sense of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s epistemic things) and a material experience – a practice – of crossdisciplinary relations: 1. As an epistemological tool, it is situated on the margins between text and non-text, not performing aesthetic opposites but merging the mediality of text and drawing by crossing and transgressing their agencies. In this sense – and informed by visual and non-textual practices of scientific research processes – drawings can become, on the one hand, more-than-texts, whereas, on the other hand, writing can enfold as drawing practice. 2. As a material experience, embracing various corporeal, performative and spatial aspects of drawing and writing/text, drawing articulates the concrete materiality of relations by tracing specific medial qualities and, in turn, opening them for interpretation in another medium. Thus, the context and mediality of the drawing-text/text-drawing shift, positing the process of drawing not only as a visual but also as a performative, corporeal and site-specific practice.

 

In our workshop, we offer a crossdisciplinary approach to exploring drawing strategies. We will transmedially interweave various materials and meanings, sparking new possibilities for expanded knowledge production. After a brief introduction to our monographs, we will facilitate three collective exercises. These exercises will delve into the themes of animals/taxonomies, plants/information, and aliens/spatial storytelling. We will experiment with tracing, crossing, merging, and dissolving the boundaries between text and drawing, epistemology and aesthetics, humans and non-humans, reality and speculation.

 

Keywords: drawing-writing, writing-drawing, taxonomies, information theory, spatial storytelling


Biography
Elena Peytchinska is a visual artist, performance designer, musician, researcher, and lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna/Department of Stage and Film Design. Thomas Ballhausen is a poet, philosopher, curator, lecturer and Head of the Interuniversity Organization Science and Arts at the University Mozarteum Salzburg. Together, they have explored the connections between space and language in numerous international conference participations, film festivals and exhibitions. Their most recent publication, “Fiction Fiction” (De Gruyter, 2023), addresses topics of spatial storytelling within the framework of language-based artistic research.