I-Be Area

I just figured out that "I-Be Area," the video I blogged about the other day because it was reviewed in the NYTimes, is currently being uploaded to YouTube. I'm not sure if the whole thing is up yet but there are quite a few up there. Also, you can go to Ryan's Trecartin's YouTube page to see his older videos.

Playlist of I-Be Area videos from Ryan Trecartin's YouTube page.

I decided to write something about "I-Be Area" while my mind is still fresh. I'm not sure if I am on-target with this, but I recall when I saw Ryan's older video "A Family Finds Entertainment" that I was so excited, and at the time I couldn't really explain why to myself or the friends who I forced to watch it. I would, however, urge you to watch the video for yourself before I make it boring with my words.

"There are so many things to be, Sally.
I know! And I don't want to be ANY OF THEM!!!"

At some point when I was living in Tokyo I transcribed the entirety of AFFE and was translating it (with help) into Japanese. I never finished, but in the course of listening to the dialogue over and over again I had a lot of time to think about how language and "voice" was used, so I'd like to talk a little bit more about that here, in the context of explaining why I think these videos are so fascinating.

"... your life, but better! With edits!"

There is a certain addictive mystery to these videos because the way it was created (shot and edited) is constantly in our faces yet paradoxically unknowable. Our ability to adopt one comfortable position in relationship to the work is completely defeated by the video's constantly shifting frame. Is that acting or are those people really freaking out? Are those people abusing Ryan because he told them to or is it as out-of-control as it appears? Is it OK that they are breaking that thing? Pushing that person around? Do they dress like that in real life? Why were those lines chosen and what was cut? Is that an affected spasmodic outburst of insanity or should we really be concerned? The constant and obtrusive editing makes us wonder whether the narrative is being driven by the chance occurrences that emerge from the happening-like shoot/parties, or whether Ryan has manipulated them effectively enough to serve the ends of a structure he planned out beforehand.

"I'll make two endings one happy and one really sad - where you fall off a building next to a dolphin that really hates you."

Perhaps the most immediately striking thing about these videos is the visual overload - the hard-to-define yet very specific color and patterning seen in the costumes, the makeup, the sets, and the special effects, all driven by a hyperfast, multi-view, decorative editing style (the Times goes on about this if you're interested). But I think there is something else going on that is just as important, which is the use of language. There are several interesting things happening here and I think they go beyond Ryan's experimental personalities, private obsessions and subcultural scene and start to reflect upon much larger themes; how we communicate in our society and how we are constructing our selves in the information age. Things important to kids like me!

"Don't talk in repetition young people..."

First of all, there is a tension between the improvised and scripted lines, between naturalness and artifice. At first we notice the ingenious, off-the-cuff back-and-forth that seems to be completely unscripted, amazing us that that something so specific could be captured on film, barely intelligible, hovering on the edge of the believable. Only after we recover from our shock do we then we notice the group chants and calls. The certain style in the way a number of characters deliver their lines that seems to be gleefully exaggerating the potentialities of the simply written line, making fun of the limitations of scripting through ridiculous diction and off-kilter timing. In fact, a number of different times Ryan or another actor repeated their lines - several "takes" of the same scene - as though Ryan could not decide which version of reality was best and chose to keep them ALL. Conversely, more than once I started to feel uncomfortable when a convincing improv lapsed into the kind of self-conscious, effortful mode of address that would usually be CUT from a reality show or stand-up comedy show in an attempt to construct a character who is always funny, always brilliant (i.e. during the speech that begins, "I have a channel that's called, 'That's so Ramada Omar...'"). It seems that Ryan's friends/actors seem to understand this completely, that they are comfortable with their discomfort, that showing the cracks in the personas they present to the world is not only a sign of deep trust and humility, but cute.

"If one of those girls does something profound and we're not there to catch it on tape because you're lazy..."

As a viewer I sometimes feel that Ryan's editing decisions are a little hard to swallow; my ego says no and pulls back, confused, embarrassed, saying, "he should have cut that..." But if I loosen up a little (it's easy - the hypnotic colors and movement), accept that the editing decisions were intentional and begin to watch the video with my critical guard down then these decisions becomes revelatory; I realize that I too am trying to become someone other than who I am, that my own attempts to become are both a tragic betrayal of myself as one I-Be Space dies, and a natural process of copying, of adopting pieces of the beautiful people I see all around me, of becoming another person. Then I can laugh and move forward in my life.

"Relocate to someplace funky."

By exemplifying artifice, the language is implicitly embodying the explicit themes discussed by the characters; who am I, who do I want to become and how do I construct myself? What if I could change my name? What if I could drop everything, everything about myself, and go start a new life in Brazil? What if I could choose my own parents, and switch them at will? What if I was a sexy girl with a big belly? What if I had red hair, yellow eyes, and green skin?

"We basically practice all day long. It's exhausting. And UNIQUE TO US!"

But there is another tension that keeps me on my toes, which is that, while the video partially functions as an exercise in seeing my own selfish center more clearly and enabling me to deconstruct it (or at least have a laugh...), it also functions as a devotional act of ego worship.

"This is a house of love. I can tell. It smells popular."

The sets/situations seem to exist in large part as a way to encourage the characters to come up with addictively memorable one-liners that, while they may be a meaningful allusion to ineffable aspects of their personality, function primarily as a self-nomination to another 15 minutes of fame*. In fact, all of these characters are are chiefly concerned with themselves, their appearance, their sexuality, their status. The relationships between characters are driven by ego, and have a strange polarity to them. There are plenty of oppositional relationships, many arguments or physical fights where both participants rip each other to shreds with plenty of pouting and whining but without getting truly angry at each other because it is taken for granted that each will naturally act with complete selfish concern. But the supportive relationships are also driven by ego - the characters express extreme love, a near pathological drive to be close, but their motivation seems to be less unselfish love that a need to establish their status in a social network. The compliments they give each other are over-the-top, yet highly-qualified, staring deep into each others eyes and then gone. When your chief concern is constructing an artificial ego for your experimental personality it makes no sense to take time off to be unselfish and there's no time to waste "just being." So where is the "I-Be Area?"

"I am tempo-rary!"

I don't think it would be uncalled-for to say that all this egocentricity and experimentation with personality relates directly the way that people carefully construct their public faces for online social networking sites; in the video there are several direct references to virtual representations of online personality - i.e. avatars in Second Life, people surfing the adoption network videos. I don't think Ryan chose to rename Olivia "Amerisha" for no reason (not that his work is not internationally relevant); he's speaking to a way of life that sprung forth from silicon valley to define the culture of his entire generation.

"No one knows my mom. She's 98% lies."

By this I am not suggesting anything about Ryan as a person and I don't know if he would agree that he has created a socially-critical work. I am merely saying that he has latched onto something subtle about how we humans work in these electronic social-spaces. These virtual "I-Be Areas" are so new that we don't know how they will change the way we relate to one-another, only that these changes will be profound. Perhaps these relationships will be as extreme as the ones seen in this video - intense intense intense nonsense-spouting supersaturated evil girlboy glamour angels shifting between electrically-magnified synchronicity and impetuously cruel dissing, simultaneously reinforcing and nullifying their conceited sense of self.

"Listen, I know what my original wants to look like and I can't believe you tried to reverse-cycle me into that person."

But in the end this video rejects the histrionics of the techno-geeks who go on and on about the liberatory potential of the virtual. No matter how much my personality is defined by my position in society, no matter how I chose to represent myself to other people, no matter who I pretend to be myself, for all intensive purposes I can't stop being me. My life feels like something continuous. I still feel like I am the same me I was when I was a little kid dancing in my adoption video. And, more than in his previous work, in "I-Be Area" I see that Ryan is engaged in the same kind of struggle. He always brings it out of the virtual and back to the face-to-fake interaction, the body in motion, the sound of a voice, the kiss. This is what I think makes his work so touchingly humanistic.

"That is ME! I look like how I feel now!!!"
echo
echo
echo

*You have no idea how long it took me after watching AFFE to pronounce the word "yeah" with one syllable again...

"CUTE DOG!!!"