Videoteca

Emotional Month 2017
Studying to be an actor, I read a tragic monologue written by my friend, Nathan Frank (also the camera operator). I started making the video right before Y2K. It was a very uncertain time. This is around the time I painted my first intentionally performative self portrait, aka Me and Molly Ringwald.

What a Boring and Disappointing Life (brown) 2017
I lived off Lombard Street in a private terrace apartment overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge for free. I had free rent because I was the caretaker for the owner of the building who lived upstairs. Her name was Stephanie Bauer. She was about 80 years old. It was a very ideal situation, except for the fact that my neighbor was a handsome French man who had loud sex most nights.

Mark Trade 2016
Shot in 2013 - In 'honor, of cause fake news - less gravity here - don't bird watch with a gun - remember your dreams before they remember you : the sloppy mix, bullshit version coming near soon USA.

Temple Time 2016
Shot in a former Masonic temple in Los Angeles – a five-story warren of large, cavernous rooms akin to a windowless convention center – Temple Time unfolds like a horror-movie group expedition in a campsite wasteland.

Comma Boat 2013
In Comma Boat, we're stuck in a mock-authoritarian fantasy--a power trip. The film centers around a director-character played by Trecartin who oscillates between feelings of omnipotence and self-doubt. As if a post-human, post-gendered reincarnation of the Fellini character in 8 ½, the director gloats and frets about professional and ethical transgressions. "I know I lied to get ahead," he admits at one point. "I've made up so many different alphabets just to get ahead in my field." The director is fancier now, but the fear nags that he might be "repeating" himself "like a dumb soldier ova and ova and ova and ova." The meta-connection to the artist's own career, while obvious, is also a decoy. All art, at some level, is about the artist. Here, reflexivity is the surface level, providing a decodable veneer that encases something more unsettling and complex. Single-channel and 3-channel versions.

Center Jenny 2013 star_border 7
The film focuses on the life of Jenny who has, according to many of the other characters, become too “left-of-center” while pursuing her interests.

Lonely Loser Trilogy: Snowboard Gear, Mountain Bikes, Skate Videos 2013
My friend lent me his Google GLAS when it was still in promotion mode. I started wearing it around the house, shooting videos. It got really hot above my ear and didn’t shoot in the best quality. I didn’t really enjoy using this device. I started to imagine myself as a tech guy who gets into snowboarding, mountain biking, and skateboarding. These videos were shot from the perspective of this character.

Item Falls 2013
In Item Falls, we are peaking. We start out at a casting call, but before long we're firmly in the grip of hallucination, shedding our anxieties and evidently regressing to the animation era, a time when stunt chickens were mere chicklets. Friendly archetypes float in and out of what seems like our bedroom. The red-headed Jenny has returned, but this time she's squeaky and trusting. Unlike in Center Jenny, here our perspective is literally centered. The camera seems to be the in middle of the room, which is good, because we're too blissed out to move. Luckily, our hallucinations look directly at us.

Ready 2010
In Ready, Wait, played by Trecartin, is introduced as the eponymous figure of the series. Wait waits. He forsakes a "career" in favor of a "job," the execution of which Trecartin calls a "work performance." A careerist like Y-Ready (Veronica Gelbaum) may call the shots, but she is locked in her own endless narcissistic ascent, whereas Wait can retire from his job at anytime, and does, only to come back from vacation marked for containment. A third type of worker, Able (Lizzie Fitch), more fluidly adopts and discards the gestures of job and career, positing herself as a hobbyist who contrives the situations and outcomes she needs to keep her wave going.

(Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me.) 2006 star_border 4.3
Trecartin describes (Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me.) as a "narrative video short that takes place inside and outside of an e-mail." Trecartin's intense visualization of electronic communication is inhabited by a cast of stylized characters: Pam, a lesbian librarian with a screaming baby in an ultra-modern hotel room; Tammy and Beth, who live in an apartment filled with installation art; and Tommy, who is seen in a secluded lake house in the woods. Pam, Tommy and Tammy are all played by Trecartin, who, wearing his signature make-up, jumps back and forth between male and female roles. Totally self-absorbed and equipped with vestigial attention spans, the characters are constantly communicating with one another on the phone or online.

Memoir 2005
The text for this video is based on a mix of personal experience and local lore. I relate my negative childhood feelings about communes to my experience at the Rainbow Gathering. This led to my short lived interest in capitalist aesthetics and media. I began to read "The Futurist Manifesto", books by Ayn Rand, and "Dianetics". I also became involved with online dating through the "Village Voice" personals. I’d spend $25 for the opportunity to send around 10 messages or 20 winks. I went on a few dates, but nothing long term came of it. I became depressed and imagined a stand-in to introduce myself and tell amusing anecdotes, like I often found myself trying to do while on dates. This video was the imagined component for a signage style installation in a corporate lobby, as if I were the founder of the company.

A Family Finds Entertainment 2005 star_border 6.2
Ryan Trecartin’s film A Family Finds Entertainment is a camp extravaganza of epic proportions. Starring Trecartin’s family and friends, and the artist himself in a plethora of outrageous roles, A Family Finds Entertainment chronicles the story of mixed up teenager Skippy and his adventures in ‘coming out’. In this over the top celebration of queerness, Trecartin’s film mines the bizarre and endearing in an unabashed pastiche of ‘bad tv’ tropes. Cheesy video special effects, dress-up chess costumes, desperate scripts, and ‘after school special’ melodrama combine in the fluency of youth-culture lingo, reflecting a generation both damaged and affirmed by media consumption.

What's The Love Making Babies For 2003
Trecartin's extraordinary digital manipulations reach a new level as he speculates in vivid animation about reproduction, sexuality, and contemporary moralities. Collapsing footage appropriated from television, the Internet, and pop culture, Trecartin and his elaborately costumed collaborators manufacture an alien yet familiar reality. Inside this startling new video world, technophile gods wearing acid-washed denim argue about the future of gender and produce cryptic TV commercials. In a surreal backyard town meeting, characters deliver disjointed polemics assembled from clashing phrases that could have originated in ad campaigns, instant messaging conversations, or twisted episodes of syndicated science fiction. Constructed from the raw material of disposable media clichés and fads, Trecartin's narrative leaves us to answer the riddles he poses.

Valentine's Day Girl 2001
Trecartin crafts a fantastical narrative about a girl whose obsessive personal utopia is disrupted. Trecartin's collaborator, Lizzie Fitch, plays a girl obsessed with Valentine's Day. Everything in her hyperactive, sped-up world revolves around Valentine's Day: red, white, and pink love-themed decorations cover every surface; heart shapes abound; Valentine's Day treats are everywhere. Her private festivities suddenly go awry as a hoard of Christmas-themed intruders appear and take her hostage in her own apartment. Gagged and bound, she is forced to watch while her ecstatic but sinister captors stage a frenzied Christmas intervention.

The Aroma of Enchantment 1992
In this engaging video essay, Lord explores the Japanese fascination with 1950's American pop culture. The Aroma of Enchantment pointedly notes how America represented the 'abundance of democracy' for a country decimated by war. Unable to revise or reject these anachronistic images, Japan is ironically stuck with empty Elvis in a time of plenty.

Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon 1992
This 1992 video highlights Dan Graham's installation Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon, originally created as part of the Rooftop Urban Park Project at the Dia Center for the Arts in 1991. The video documents and further explores Graham's investigations of the urban environment, from Abbe Laugier's theory of the Rustic Hut to Parisian shopping arcades, wintergardens, museums, Disneyland and corporate office buildings. For the Dia Center in New York City, Graham developed an environment, analogous to a small-scale urban park, which integrates aesthetic and utilitarian functions, and spatial and visual experiences, bringing the landscape into the roof and extending the roof into the landscape. Graham writes: "The pavilion structures are psychologically and socially self-reflective. There is a dialectic between the perception of oneself and other bodies perceiving themselves, making the spectator conscious of him or herself as a body.

Incidence of Catastrophe 1988
In the video, Thomas the protagonist is played by Hill which confounds the self-reflexive nature of the book’s relationships all the more, making the video something of a “transcreation.” The “reader” begins in the liquidity of the text almost as if he were waking from drowning. Images of the sea ravishing the shore – small cliffs of sand eroding and collapsing – are inter-cut with extreme close-ups of text and the texture of the page and book itself being flooded with ocean waves. In scene after scene the reader attempts to re-enter the book only to find himself a part of intense dreams and hallucinations.

Digest of Video Performance, 1978 - 1983 1983
Writes Imai, "As a photographer during the 1970s, my interest in capturing time led me to explore the video medium. After utilizing video in two or three works, I saw a similarity between videotape and an ancient scroll, in that they both capture a story of our time. I started using physical videotape as a metaphorical representation of time, rolling out the magnetic tape from right to left, representing a narrative from beginning to end."

Lapse Communication 1980
Writes Kobayashi, "In 1972 I started a series of participatory performances where the first person performs an ambiguous action in front of a recording camera; the next person watches the recorded footage and imitates the action in front of a recording camera; the third person repeats the same procedure using the second person's video recording, and so on. Within the repetition of recording and action, the original gesture is transformed by the participants' misunderstanding, interpretation, and memory."

Sunstone 1979 star_border 6.9
Experimental computer animation from pioneering artist Ed Emshwiller.

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