Pascual Sisto’s immersive video installation Inside Out is a tour de force for both its technical accomplishments and its compelling, albeit obtuse and ambiguous narrative. Sisto has choreographed an approximately twenty-minute symphony of sound, lights and video, culling his material from disparate sources. While Inside Out is a continuous loop, it has a definitive beginning, middle and end. And although it can be entered at any point, it is best to viewed from the start so as to appreciate the nuances of the narrative. Shot in high definition, the visual cacophony is alluring and assaultive. 

Pascual Sisto, Inside Out. Courtesy of the artist and Five Car Garage.

The imagery moves across the disparate screens and includes white face masks somersaulting in a darkened space; cyborg faces with blank eyes; vertical rows of chains lit from above with white light and from below with red light; and a gathering of paparazzi whose flashing cameras syncopate with a glowing white monitor. The videos also depict disembodied figures, cyborgs and reference artificial intelligence and the interconnectedness between the analogue and digital worlds.

Pascual Sisto, Inside Out. Courtesy of the artist and Five Car Garage.

As the visuals flow—from computer generated as well as enhanced imagery of human beings and electronics to lines of cascading text and blank screens of pulsating colors—the sound track segues from computerized speech to manipulated symphonic melodies drawn from Beethoven, the theme song from the 1970 film Love Story and Daisy Bell, a tune featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Pascual Sisto, Inside Out. Courtesy of the artist and Five Car Garage.

Sisto’s remarkable ability to synthesize a visual and conceptual collage from both original and found footage, and his strategic weaving of narrative from a wide range of elements using sophisticated computer programming, creates a visual and aural flow so captivating that the technology almost disappears. Yet it is because of technology that Sisto can achieve such a compelling synthesis. Through the transitioning of the room from dark to light and the synchronizing of musical clips and electronic sounds with film fragments, Sisto creates a portrait of the future where transitional, disoriented and altered states ebb and flow, yet offers no conclusions about the proposed state of well being that technology promises. 

Pascual Sisto, Inside Out, January 27 – March 17, 2018 at Five Car Garage, Santa Monica, CA 90021, www.emmagrayhq.com