Audio By Carbonatix
Ryan Trecartin evokes comparison to a wired wizard of id. In “Any Ever,” an epic series of videos that make the head spin, the ferociously inventive artist shuffles through identity shifts faster than a Vegas poker dealer. Trecartin, who has been hailed the “magus of the Internet century,” is known for creating frenetic, lavishly colored films that strip-mine our media-saturated, overmerchandised culture. He typically employs the virtual dissonance of the Internet, reality TV, Twitter feeds, and Facebook narcissism to convey notions of how the concept of “self” becomes easily blurred in a society addled by mass media. In Trecartin’s attention-grabbing films, signifiers of gender, sexuality, race, and the notion of a fixed identity are jumbled through a pop-cultural blender and served as a deliberately puzzling concoction that leaves the viewer reeling from an ADD-inducing onslaught. The movies themselves are a boiling cauldron of chaotic jump cuts, loosely based narrative threads, hyper-manic editing, and an ear-rattling dialogue that sounds like some sort of spastic patois spit out by actors who have been inhaling helium.
