INT. EXT. PLACE DAY/NIGHT

Looking into the camera, silent and direct, a person counts their fingers up from 1 to 5 and back down from 5 to 1, guiding you to count internally in your head as well. The opening of Inneke Taal’s work is deceptively simple—the perception of instructions for you to see and listen attentively while setting a ‘rising and falling’ motif for what’s to come. The title of the work, INT. EXT. PLACE DAY/NIGHT, uses the scene heading format for staging narratives (formerly used for scripts, films and plays) as an open-ended invitation for multiple readings and interpretations.

A series of polyvocal moments structure the work. Interior sounds of voices in a room play against exterior images of industrial lines of social and environmental infrastructures—juxtaposing opposites: soft/loud, up/down, interior/exterior. The words are intended as embedded sounds (sometimes detectable, depending on the viewer) with linguistic meanings that challenge social infrastructures. However, the work is drawn more towards tone, timbre and dynamics creating textured micro-rhythms. The rhythm of sounds and images shift in movements of converging, colliding and diverging. Lines run in parallel, while bodies move seemingly independently but serendipitously cross paths. The effect is like tuning in and out of a crowd or radio. Even after the polyvocal chorus dies away, sounds of a scratching pen on paper lingers, recalling the craft of writing.

The source of these gestures and voices come from workshops where Taal wrote scripts for participants to perform. The participants came from a range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds in Taal’s masters program. The scripts were loose and open-ended, sometimes in the form of a poem or prompt, allowing participants to bring their own interpretation to their performances. Taal recorded while moving around the room, her body as recorder. She described the process of making the work as “different stages of listening; listening to context and bodies over time, the writing of intuitive scripts in response (often as metaphor), becoming the roaming listener within the workshop (zoom and headphones), the editor of sound after the workshop – all in an ongoing feedback loop.” While we have technology and devices to record everything around us, our bodies are also vessels that listens, retains, memorises and recalls the things we hear on a daily basis.

The shape and movement of sounds and images in various combinations describes our social entanglement, intertwined like the notes on a page of music, with the possibility of being played and interpreted by different players. An orchestra of events, fragments, crescendos and accents, moments of rest and tragedy. We are the unknowing ensemble in the music of existence.

At one point in the work, the hum of the train is immediately followed by voices humming a similar melodic ambience. Notice, at another point, digitally chopped voices fire rapidly in a machine-gun like rhythm, immediately followed by a similar chopping sound of a helicopter. Both are sonic recalls and reflections of social infrastructures within industrial systems. Furthermore, the overall rhythm of the polyvocal chorus mimics the distinctive rise and fall of a siren. A siren, like music, can be felt and interpreted as warning by almost any hearing person, despite language, age, background, etc.

In the Netherlands, where Taal undertook her masters, there is a public siren that sounds across the country on the first Monday of each month at exactly 12pm. First used in World War II in 1939 and then monthly during the Cold War, the national alert system is meant to prepare people for possible emergencies. But if the sound of warning becomes part of the system, how do we tell the difference between routine and the real emergency? If our lives are so integrated into society's built infrastructures and industrial systems, are we safeguarded by emergencies or doomed for collapse?

Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) gives us a glimpse of Vienna’s failed social, class and immigration systems at the time the film was set. The characters’ fates are invisibly chained together and, without obvious signs or apparent forewarning, ends in a mass shooting in its linear narrative. In 2025, tragedies happen in real time, captured live on TV, news and social media. Is a crisis also a warning of something bigger? Since the first siren, there have been many warning signs/sirens, whether local, global, social, environmental or humanitarian events of crisis in a world that is increasingly hurtling towards collapse. That is, if we view our time as linear.

Taal’s work encourages us to look and listen closely beyond the usual shapes and patterns of our social structures. If the work offers us a non-linear, non-singular collective experience, then could there be little sirens or warning signs happening all the time? Maybe in the form of a whisper, a gesture or a flickering light. The act of attentive listening, seeing, conversing, engaging and polyvocality interpretation is a practice in itself. It strengthens our relationship to one another and creates patterns to guide us. Recall the opening shot. Is the countdown a warning or the shape of an incoming crisis? Are we counting up to the sun we are flying too close and down to inevitable collapse or is it helping us brace the rise and fall of something preventable?

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