The Videos of Ryan Trecartin
It was at the blog of “transgressive” writer Dennis Cooper – an interesting experiment in itself, Dennis starting the blog (NSFW) at the behest of a poll result on his website, where he now personally answers every comment on the blog thus making his comment replies tower over the actual posts. The readers also contribute to the blog proper and a fiction anthology was generated from young writers who participate in the comments, the blog one of the more successful and organic examples of reader participation and author-reader interaction in the internet literary worlds I think … – that I came across a post about the videos of twenty-something artist and video maker Ryan Trecartin, who was discovered after New York artist Sue De Beer saw clips of Ryan’s video A Family Finds Entertainment on social networking site Friendster, the brilliance of which simultaneously blew me away and made me feel like a decrepit old failed artist in comparison.
A Family Finds Entertainment (2004) is Ryan’s masterpiece, made on a thousand dollar budget and a Mac, a digital hallucinogenic brew of queer camp, day glo colors and sets, a twisted narrative overlaid with computer graphics, dress up costumes and make up, pitch shifted vocal effects, indie pop and electronica floating through and away, all crammed together and somehow pulling off the twisted telling of the coming out story of a young guy named Skippy. This isn’t your parents psychedelia, it’s the visual and audio equivalent of stupidly taking too much ketamine in public and somehow walking home sliding down a k-hole, feeling like you’re being processed through a quantum computer, reality literally feeling like it’s been turned inside and out, existing and observing in a multitude of dimensions.
(Tommy Chat Just Emailed Me) (2006) is Ryan’s latest and stylistically it shares many of the components of Family though the narrative is more oblique, taking “place inside and outside of an internet email.” The focus on internet modes of communication isn’t surprising since he states in an interview that “I love the net, always and I’m highly influenced and affected by the ways in which people communicate and talk. Phones? Tv? Internet? Body language!” (Tommy Chat Just Emailed Me) gives a truer expression of our fragmented and rhizomatic modes of electronic communication than any token product placed cell phone call or instant messaging exchange in some crap mass market blockbuster could ever do.
You can watch more of Family and his other videos at Ryan’s YouTube page.
