Debbie Stenzel, Starshake: 5928
17 March, 2012 - 9 September, 2012
Little Gallery
Debbie Stenzel, Starshake:5928
Debbie Stenzel's Starshake: 5928 references abandonment of vehicles within the Christchurch CBD as a result of the magnitude 6.3 earthquake on 22 February 2011 in which 183 people lost their lives.
'My work begins from quantitative subsets of data. Informed by interests in systems and processes, memetics, complexity theory, and information theories, it seeks ways to make sense of sociologically evolutionary or devolutionary situations. Assuming the order and disorder of life underpinned by mathematical certainty and data integrity, matrices of pattern and randomness are used to inform aesthetic decisions. Universal laws hold constant, providing a grid structure of support for today's human/posthuman hybrid whose roots have been replaced by aerials. This woven mesh of interconnectedness strengthens when stretched and distorted by extraordinary events that occur within the ordinariness of everyday life.
Debbie Stenzel, Starshake:5928
Today's chronoscopic (compressive) timescale with its expectation of instantaneous message exchange has eroded feedback loops and opportunities for self-reflexivity. Within the making of artworks I design systems that employ chronotopic (expansive) processes, making multiple repetitious marks or objects to archive a time/value equation of temporal distortion. These repetitious actions allow my CPU (Central Processing Unit) to process information through its incongruous circuitry boards, riddled with faulty nodes and switches, resulting in a new order of things created by processors reading forward and backward amid distortions of accumulated pasts and futures until a new order is achieved, or at least modelled. The result is an excess that requires embodiment or registration as a way of grounding, or crystallising a new reality; an expression of the process undertaken both affectively and cognitively through the desire to make sense of the inexplicable and unknowable. I describe my work as the systematized expression of a chronotopic process.
The use of ordinary materials and basic methods of production affirm the value of the human, the ordinary, and present an aesthetic that is familiar to today's punk author/producer/consumer, while slick fabricated elements capture mechanical methods and marks registering values sympathetic to the posthuman. The use of quasi-objects as signifiers, placeholders, memory keepers, or archive provide physical representation of a reconstructed moment in time; a message exchange system or universal language performing specific functions.'
-Debbie Stenzel