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The young American video maker Ryan Trecartin has gained an significant position within the field of the contemporary art. With his delirious videos he has become such a key figure for the wider and wider orbit of post-internet art, that he has been classified in 32nd place in the Power100, the list of the most influential personalities in the world of the contemporary art drafted every year by ArtReview.
Trecartin films the life of young Americans completely conformed and addicted to the trash culture of the Kardashians, the social network and the amatorial porn.
The characters of Trecartin’s films are not simply conformed to the language and the code of behaviour of that culture, but its aspects that they have absorbed, have also shaped their own appearance.
The acid colours, the hyper-accelerated movements and passages from one scene to another, along with the modified voices, outline an anthropological change, rather than a cultural one. Trecartin represents the switch to the trans-human, to a kind of human heavily conditioned by the internet and the digital world, which rather than support a potential evolution, seems to have caused a serious regression.
Watching Trecartin’s works, you cannot avoid the feeling of a constant annoyance and a spontaneous aversion toward their characters, which leads you to question whether this is the result of a successful social critique or, instead, we should agree with the video-maker, Richard Grayson, when he says that Trecartin’s videos just show adolescents “partying and doing the sort of weird shit that young people have always done and which is now videoed and posted on social-media sites”.