August 2025

I-BE AREA
2007, USA, dir. Ryan Trecartin, 108 mins


NOTES:

Originally written for the Perverts newsletter, 08/14/25

Ryan Trecartin's I-BE AREA originally debuted in 2007 at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in NYC, and went on to screen at the Guggenheim and various other institutions. The feature-length video art piece was received to "joyous critical consensus rarely seen in the art world".

From Hammer Projects:

"In I-BE AREA, Trecartin weaves together several unruly stories with fast-moving, fast-talking characters that deal with such themes as cloning, adoption, self-mediation, life-style options, virtual identities and larger questions of an existential nature."

"[In times past,] who you were as a person was defined by what you look like, where you were born, who your family was, some basic things that were pretty unchangeable. The internet allows us to become re-individualized: when we go online, we are creating a distinct self, different from who we are here. Our internet-selves are liberated from all of those physical, familial, geographic constraints, and they invite us to say, "who are you? Who do you want to be?"

The internet emerged as a new infrastructure for society, and that is the age we are in now. And it's breaking down classic nationalist walls, it's creating something like the multinational corporate state, but as a social form, and is truly a new era of history in a way that we can feel, in some ways, but is ultimately much grander than anything we can perceive."