Review of Interno3’s ‘A Beautiful Day’

Bill Viola, a pioneer in the medium of video art, once said that there would come a day when the electronic eye will record everything. That day is here. We are surrounded by state-of-the-art technologies capable of creating total environments that envelop us in image and sound.

Interno3’s A Beautiful Day plays with this transition in an interaction between high-tech and low-fi, presenting daily life as a series of deconstructed micro-stories. The  narrative is an audiovisual sculpture and immersive soundscape that exposes the parts of electronic devices; it fragments vision, picks apart sensations and undermines the nature of events. Interno3 analyse sounds and images: rifts, glitches and repeated loops are analysed in order to understand the meaning of a beautiful day.

The technology in A Beautiful Day is a fundamental aspect of their practice, distinguishable by its precision and direct simplicity, yet employed to investigate complex environmental issues. ‘Beautiful Day’ and ‘Mare Nostrum’ have a sleek sculptural presence but upon further investigation the beautiful monochrome imagery they display reveals a sinister intent. The sound of a raging storm and the eerie sloshing of water are a reminder of days that are far from beautiful – the raging power of Hurricane Katrina and the moment before the Indonesian Tsunami tragedy.

‘Wake Up’, ‘Pleasure Presence’, ‘Ghost Writer’ and ‘We Don’t Think Differently’ were conceived for the DiVA Art Fair 2007 in New York. They are perfect examples of the deconstructed micro-stories playing within the medium of technology. Each combined system (LCD with integrated multimedia player) plays a looped short story; they are nonsense meetings between hi-fi and low-fi, video sculptures of retro design objects. The recordings have a single and precise point of vision, giving them a unique style and their dedicated soundtracks generate a polyphonic sound.

Interno3 investigate the language of video and sound, using methods of connecting and separating sequences and examining the state or conditions of the technology itself.  As technology improves, they will probe it, and work with the glitches, exposing the cracks and working with the creation of malfunctions.  They choose to search for the accidental errors that contaminate the recorded performance.

http://www.interno3.org/

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