Interview: Kerstin Ergenzinger

Kerstin Ergenzinger: Inner Cuts, 2009. Still.

Inner Cuts is part of the exhibition Noisewomb, curated by Aryan Kaganof. Was it your first time working with Kaganof?

Yes and no. We never worked together in an exhibition context. But when we met during a residency in Malmö, we developed a really inspiring exchange between our ways of working and thinking. This exchange became quite profound as Aryan spontaneously made an experimental video portrait about my way of working.

Your work is entitled Inner Cuts. What is an inner cut?

I imagine an inner cut as something like a mental cut or a mental switch that links relationships. Possibly by connecting or disconnecting synapses, an inner cut would generate associations and construct meanings and feelings. An inner cut in this sense is located within the area where a thought is still a mixture of all senses, not yet spoken, written, made visual, audible or tangible. I don´t imagine an inner cut as a conscious act.

Kerstin Ergenzinger: Inner Cuts, 2009. Still.

The idea behind the exhibition is the notion of a primal sound. How does your work relate to this idea of a primal sound?

Inner Cuts is my exploration of what Noisewomb or a primal sound could be. At first I was quite bewildered by the notion Noisewomb - fascinated and at the same time unsettled. So Rilkes contemplation "Ur-Geräusch" (primal sound) about his first experience with an experimental set-up of a phonograph during a physics lesson became a very important hint which path to take.

Where does noise primarily come from? How does a certain act sound in comparison to how it looks like? How would it feel if you touched it? And what traces could be observed? Would one be able to reconstruct the incident from the remains? These kind of questions eventually led to an associative reenactment of the phonograph experiment that triggered Rilkes thoughts. I decided to invent a setting to produce tactile, touchable, traces while recording their visual and acoustic levels separately. Therefore, I gave me some tasks, trying to reach beyond a surface without representing something figurative.

How do you categorize Inner Cuts? As an artwork, an investigation or both? And why?

I don´t separate any artwork from an investigation. Being engaged in an artistic practice always incorporates investigating and questioning. So it is both.

Setting up Inner Cuts, 2009.

What is your experience and opinion about making art for the Net? And in which ways does it affect your work, that it is exhibited on the Net at Netfilmmakers.dk?

It has affected the way I focus on the screen as the physical surface and the medium that renders Inner Cuts visible. I imagined different situations for observers sitting, working or doing whatever in front of a screen and became very much interested in making the physical machine itself a part of the piece. Therefore, I decided to show it full-screen only. For a work in the net context this is a bit harsh or at least it isn´t democratic to force someone to either watch it fullscreen or not at all. But the fullscreen is important to fill and animate the whole screen while the sound - at least on laptops - spreads out the built-in speakers near the hands that are touching the keyboard. In this sense, I think that Inner Cuts is also an installation.

One of the things I found interesting about Inner Cuts is, that you worked with various rules, tasks and questions. Can you describe some of these?

For the setting, I fixed a digital SLR camera face to face with white paper. The white paper was put above a black paper and beneath both I placed a cut mat. On the cut map I fixed a piezoelectric microphone. This whole setting was placed on a table with a cut-out to include the space below the table.

Then I gave me these tasks: destroy the paper starting by cutting a) vertically, b) horizontally, c) diagonally. To thin the paper use rubber, to take away the crumbs use your hand and your spit. Take as many pictures as possible and record the sound of all actions with a contact microphone. Nothing shall remain, but the cut mat. Allow yourself to follow the unfolding phenomena, to break the rules and to vary and experiment. Analyze and organize the imagery and sound independently and find a way to reconnect and spread it out on the screen and the built-in speakers of a personal computer.

Setting up Inner Cuts, 2009.

Is there any special reason that you worked with these rules and tasks in the making of the work?

These tasks layout the space in which the associative reenactment of the phonograph experiment unfolds. As if there was no content as such but to cut surfaces, while listening to what I´m doing and letting one action be influenced by the other.

Did you break your rules at any time in the process and if so, how?

Yes and no, as I included the rule of breaking a rule. The actual cutting and recording have been very associative and intuitive. I was always wearing my headphones while destroying the paper in all kind of different ways. Therefore, I acted inside an acoustically totally different world. But there was a moment when I stopped taking pictures; while using spit to take away the crumbs my body in combination with the microphone became an antenna and received all kinds of middle wave radio-frequencies. For a while I only recorded this distant noises and signals. Another example; at the end I used glass and a mirror to be able to cut on top of my computer screen which I placed underneath the cut-out of the table. Additionally, I captured the screen itself while playing parts of the already edited material.

Kerstin Ergenzinger: Footnote, Malmö, 2008. Kerstin Ergenzinger: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear, Utah, 2005.

Is this back-and-forth process of questioning and doing an action something that is characteristic for your way of making art?

Yes.

By using a strict method, one gets the feeling that you get inspiration in science? Is that true? And do you see a relation between art and science?

I don´t think that the method of Inner Cuts, seen as a method behind an artwork, is especially strict. It is just that I describe it within its limits on the netfimmakers blog. I did this because I felt that the whole process was an essential part in the context of the Noiswomb discourse gathering around Rilkes written thoughts about a primal sound. I think the different fields are related in many ways. Both deal with the unknown. Neither artists nor scientist stop questioning, both are often inventing experiments and methods, ways of representing, measuring, looking, mapping, qualifying and so on. But regarding the unknown, artists are rather developing an ability to stay with a very uncertain situation than to dissolve and explain it.

I´m mostly inspired by directly observing my surroundings. While trying to find out why something is absorbing me, I´m very interested what kind of "scientific thinking" or explaining myself the world are embedded in my own way of thinking an acting. Which of course is constantly updated, changed and shifted by the use of certain technics, by reading, talking, listening and watching.

You have worked both with installation and video. In which way does your working with an installation differ from your way of working with video?

I have worked a lot more with installations than with video. To stay within this categories, I wouldn´t consider myself as an video-artist. When I use video it is more to record or play with certain phenomena or ways of seeing and observing. And to be precise, Inner Cuts is not a video, it is an animation of stills from paper cuts, silhouettes, taken with a still camera. It is rather drawing or mark making, as a practice of seeing and investigating that connects my installations and the way I´m working with video. To realize a piece as an installation or as a video means to shift the focus in terms of how I deal with space, movement and time together with the position and role of the observer. Working with installations also means to explicitly deal with the physical experience of space and material, which I´m very much after.

Kerstin Ergenzinger: ..˚W/..˚O nodegreewestnodegreeast, 2005/2006. Space-related light installation.

As a closure, can you tell me a little about what you are working on at the moment?

Right now I´m mainly working on two new installations, Whiskers in Space and Insight. Both will be shown first in Cologne this May and June. Insight is a project for a solo exhibition, a site-specific light installation. I´m developing an architectural intervention for the space to realize a staircase-like passage. With light-drawing devices a composition of light signs is projected that connects and transforms built space and existing space. Whiskers in Space is an installation of kinetically reactive sculptures. Distributed over the floor of a space, they form a meadow like area that is covered in bristles. A bit similar to the whiskers of a cat in the dark, the sculptural whiskers serve both as feelers and antennae. The idea is that the whiskers absorb and adopt the noise of the space as their own agitated, slightly nervous state of being and adapt and mirror the changes.

Thank you.

Kerstin Ergenzinger: ..˚W/..˚O nodegreewestnodegreeast, 2005/2006. Space-related light installation.