Andrus Laansalu is a lecturer and doctoral student at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at the Estonian Academy of Arts. He studies the area where art history and conservation overlap, approaching it through biosemiotics – how objects of art break down and how the process is seen in culture. Outside of his academic activity, he is also a team member of the part virtual, part physical exploratory theatre platform e¯lektron, is active in music and sound creation, and plays the string bass and saxophone. He writes for the press on motorcycles and new technology. He has also been involved for years in teaching photography, at first at the Tartu Art College and later at the Estonian Academy of Arts. At EAA, he currently teaches classes on art analysis based on evolutionary theory and biosemiotics, the physical materials that human cultures have used for making art, and the history of restoration/conservation.
Andrus Laansalu has written experimental works, essays and cultural criticism, published in the press, in a collection of his works titled Gatlingi kuulipilduja (‘Gatling Gun’, 2008) and elsewhere. He was also a founder of the Tartu Theatre Lab (2000–2003), a significant part of innovative and technological theatre development in Estonia. In the 1990s, he worked as the culture editor of the newspaper Postimees.