There’s an ambient hum on the Tronic Studio website. You can turn it off, but it won’t matter. If you’ve heard it once, you hear it behind all their work. It just belongs there. It’s fitting that another medium, sound, seems so natural for their work, because Tronic are one of the most interdisciplinary of studios in existence.

Vivian Rosenthal and Jesse Seppi met in the Columbia graduate architecture program. Upon completing studies they moved directly into motion work, but they didn’t abandon the desire to build nor the rigorous analysis of their training. Thus their remarkable record of integrating their graphic work into installations, including built space, sculpture and interactivity. There are a few studios doing this (the old KDLabs among them), but not many, and none so skillfully.

If you’re going to build out an installation with a video element, what do you do? Reproduce the same elements you have in the video? Maybe once, but you might not get asked to do a second. Better, you start with a theme that you can express across the media. This is what Tronic does with their piece ‘Bloom.’ Each element in itself is simple, but as a whole they work together, even bringing in the space itself to the effect. Likewise with their GE presentation, build around a theme of purity. The video itself is pure, representational and stripped of design artifice, the better to unite with the theme. And in a way Tronic also bring their own environment into the mix. Where else could these people work but New York City?

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