“I only lie to people I hate.”

Eric, Diego and I went to see Ryan Trecartin speak at the New Museum Friday. I’d seen bits of “A Family Finds Entertainment” at the Whitney Biennale last year, and I’d heard a ton about him because, you know, he went to RISD and graduated in the same film class as Eric and a bunch of his friends.

His work has been something that I’ve been unable to wrap my head around. “A Family Finds Entertainment” was actually his thesis project, and gathering what I could from the bits of it I saw at the Biennale, I considered it as something akin to psychedelic horseshit, a documentation of the RISD party lifestyle that can generally be so alienating to be around.

But watching the remaining 4 of 5 segments on Youtube (part 3 was removed when Google bought Youtube and buckled down on showing nudity– in this case an erect penis) revealed some really amazing moments of insight on digital communication.

At the New Museum, Trecartin was an unassuming, somewhat scattered guy, who revealed depths that he seemed to be unable to communicate with words. Every question asked of him elicited a scattered, multi-layered story, an avalanche of explanation that generally seemed to confuse more than illuminate. But this presentation of himself seems to prove a point that his new film “I-Be Area” explores in more detail. The fluidity and layering of identity in a digital age, the construction of history as a stream of shallow consciousnesses and the difficulty in constructing a lasting narrative when information is ever changing and the very definition of knowledge and collective experience is shifting.

I’ve seen only the clips of “I-Be Area” that Trecartin chose to show at the artist’s talk, but what I did see was far more engaging than those fleeting moments of insight in “A Family Finds Entertainment.” In a particularly amazing segment, we see the transformation of I-Be 2, a clone, into the personality of “Oliver,” which is bought over the internet. Once I-Be becomes Oliver, it decides to change its name to Amerisha, so we see the evolution of three different characters. What’s amazing about this segment most specifically is the use of rapid-fire dialogue. The voices of the characters in the scene are at once teenage girlish and strangely menacing. The dialogue is so fast and loud, so devoid of emotional meaning that the voices are almost relativized to the position of sound effects. The characters have conversations that seem to revolve around teen girl topics before you realize they’re talking about slipping into different identities and using the word “bisexual” as if it was quaintly from a prehistoric area. There’s something so foreign yet dead on about it.

Trecartin’s performances in all of the pieces are oddly captivating.

He stated up front that his works are predominately about digital communication– instant messaging, Myspace profiles, even Youtube itself, which is the main mode of distribution for his films. But the thing is, when asked if he felt that there was something wrong with his characters, with this manipulatable, mutable version of identity he stood in defense of his characters. He said he liked them, that he thought there was nothing wrong with the way they lived. Which is something that doesn’t seem quite right. What about the spinning, spinning, spinning of his films? How out of control they feel? How the characters seem creepy because they never quite interact with one another? I’m not sure if this is something he’s figured out exactly yet.

“I-Be Area” isn’t available on Youtube, but this short film “Tommy Chat Just E-mailed Me” is kind of like the prequel.