Write 'em Til You Can't Write No More

Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying. Other times, you’ve got to laugh to keep from screaming yourself into a coma when confronted with the cold and absurd paradox of human existence in an inhuman world. The latter phenomenon is the best description of what occurs when you’re watching a video created by the enigmatic multimedia art collective Wham City Comedy . The group, many of whom met while attending SUNY Purchase College, formed sometime in the mid-2000’s and began to make a name for themselves by regularly hosting live shows in the Baltimore area that served as a showcase for the various acts and projects the collective’s myriad members were working on. Their projects span across the mediums of television, music, web design, and live theater, with all of them unified by their examinations of alienation, confusion, and the absurd aspects of daily life that we have been programmed to look at as being completely normal. The c...

Y’know, as a genre fan with a taste for the bizarre, I sometimes delude myself into thinking that there’s nothing that can truly shock me, nothing that can peel through the layers of psychological desensitization that have been built up from years of giallo movies and AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE reruns. Then, something comes along and reminds me that my media-based journey down the rabbit hole of mankind’s collective unconscious has only just begun. In this case, that something is the avant-garde anarchy that is Ryan Trecartin’s I-BE AREA. I was introduced to this 107-minute long digital freak show via a friend who had stumbled upon it by finding out a portion of it was sampled on the Death Grips song “@DeathGripz”. The film has no discernable plot to speak of, but judging by my tepid steps into Trecartin’s oeuvre, he doesn’t seem to be concerned with telling any straightforward narratives. What I-BE AREA lacks in terms of a plot or conventional pacing, it makes up...