Kerstin Ergenzinger

Kerstin Ergenzinger’s artwork envisions a conceptual and material framework for the technologies of inspection, visual transfer, and architecture. Her installation work raises questions about exactly what is lived space, what is our body, and by what measures do we judge it? In Ergenzinger’s work, futuristic landscapes pulse with the viewers, machines, sound, and architecturally built space interconnected with existing space by illumination and speed. By surveilling moving information at mixed velocities, viewers can question just what is being measured, and who is in control.

Ergenzinger mainly works within the field of sculpture, architecture, drawing and video. She works with traditional media, with computer based and technological mechanisms. She studied Fine Arts and Media Art at the University of Arts Berlin, the Chelsea College of Art and Design London and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. At the moment she lives and works in Cologne and Bremen. http://www.nodegree.de

Triggering Disquietude

In this poetic essay, Kerstin Ergenzinger, artist at RETHINK, focuses on the act of questioning oneself, which she sees as a political act in itself. Thus (or in this sense), the resulting state of mind, an awareness, is also essential to the struggle with climate change. Triggering Disquietude condenses views on borders, on perception and the relationship of man and place. It transgresses from English to German and loops, asking the same questions at its beginning and end but in different languages - showing how these questions are transnational and translingual. The essay is a border motion in itself. 

Triggering Disquietude.

How do we sense? 
How do we measure? 
How do we identify? 
How do we organize? 
How do we relate to ourselves? 
How do we assess a situation and how do we act? 
How about the aesthetic dimension at the functionality of place? 
How about the impact of peripheral and underlying information? 
What about the area between the assignable and the indeterminable? 
How do we handle diffuse conditions? 
How to navigate noise? 
Is this dust or dark energy? 
Is it noise or did we catch a signal? 
Are we gathering data or glimpses while we are developing models and strategies to process and shape a housing for reality? 
Are we able to comprehend more by gathering more and more information?  
Are we able to process the information?  
Is it pure construction? 
How to identify all these human projections? 
What about our longing for stability? 
Is it this curiosity to dig and detect that is essential and fulfilling?
 
It is essential to be aware of limitations. -- To ask ourselves how we are handling borders. To be aware of our mechanisms and to structure our surroundings. To be aware of our urgent need for control. To be aware that we are casting a net of boundaries upon the world, on which we fix our findings. This knowledge becomes the net´s architecture itself. A system of established theories and interpretations, which needs to be touched, cut and reformed to avoid becoming a cage. 

"Being aware of", is not a constant state of mind, it is unstable. It is a beautiful challenge as it enables us to transgress the boundaries, to develop and change things. And it is a disquieting anticipation as it is biting the hand that feeds us.  

Can experimental artistic practice function as some kind of laboratory to explore the raw material of perception, consciousness and subconsciousness?  

I believe in the need for these associative experiments. In the need to engage in a long-term research in the sensory and mental relationship of man and place. In the need for installations as test arrangements, pseudo-scientific constellations, constellations that produce and question borders of one’s own perception, constellations that take the observer on a journey through the subtle layers of one’s own production of reality.  

Let us trigger disquietude.  
Let us travel in between sharpness and blurring.  
Let us explore what isn’t easy to identify.  
Let us sharpen our senses. 
Let us give ourselves over to this border motion, let us take different pathways, sensuous pathways and keep up the useless focus not blinded by efficiency and functionality. 

Sich wahrnehmen beim Wahrnehmen, ohne dass man nicht wahrnimmt, dann ist man Drinnen und Draußen gleichermaßen, begriffen im Hin und Her dieser Grenzbewegung.  

Wie nehmen wir wahr? 
Wie vermessen wir? 
Wie identifizieren wir? 
Wie organisieren wir? 
In welchem Verhältnis stehen wir zu uns selbst? 
Wie beurteilen wir eine Situation und wie handeln wir? 
Was ist mit der ästhetischen Dimension in Bezug auf die Funktionalität von Orten? 
Was ist mit dem Einfluss von Peripherem und Unterschwelligem? 
Was ist mit dem Gebiet von Zuordenbarem und Unbestimmbarem? 
Wie begegnen wir diffusen Bedingungen? 
Wie soll man im Rauschen navigieren? 
Ist das da Staub oder dunkle Energie? 
Ist es Rauschen oder ein Signal? 
Sammeln wir Daten oder flüchtige Eindrücke wenn wir Modelle und Strategien entwickeln, um der Wirklichkeit eine Behausung zu geben? 
Verstehen wir mehr, indem wir mehr und mehr Informationen anhäufen? 
Sind wir in der Lage die Informationen zu verarbeiten? 
Sind es nur Konstruktionen? 
Wie sollen wir all diese Projektionen des Menschen orten? 
Was ist mit unserer Sehnsucht nach Stabilität? 
Ist es die Neugier zu wühlen und zu erkunden, die wesentlich und erfüllend ist? 
 
Kerstin Ergenzinger 2009