Ryan Trecartin, I-Be Area
Thursday April 23
9:00-11:00pm
Fever Dream
In Ray Bradbury’s 1948 short story Fever Dream, a 13 year-old boy is consumed by a feverish plague of microbes that consume him from the inside out, forming a new being that recovers with super-human powers. The originals living within I-Be Area are afflicted with a similar digital virus that has copied and re-formatted their identities into Second Life avatars, blogging pseudonyms, and Facebook profiles. Mirroring Bradbury’s metaphor for pubescent anxiety, isolation, and identity crisis, Trecartin’s post-modern characters are pitted against one another, competing for fans, selling their personalities, and honing their highly individualized “stylized angst” in an operatic video opus of hallucinatory drag culture on the information superhighway.
Kalup Linzy, Chewing Gum | 2008 | 2:25mins | BetaSP | USA
Ryan Trecartin, I-Be Area | 2007 | 1:48:00mins | BetaSP | USA
program running time: 1:53:00
co-sponsored by UBC Gender Performances Research and Reflection Group and HIM Health Initiative for Men Society