We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Witness (or re-witness) this incredible 1987 video by artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Their homemade Rube Goldberg machine– constructed inside a 100-foot warehouse and mobilized by fire, water, chemistry and the law of gravity–is a meditation on chance and probability, as well as a hypnotic display of causal relationships.

Video artist and sculptor Ryan Trecartin’s D.I.Y. digital opuses are overwhelming in their labyrinthine visual complexity, reaching new aesthetic depths through a deluge of multi-layered raw footage spliced together faster than we can process what we’re seeing. As a device, dazzling viewers with an over-stimulated cyberdelic assualt is nothing new– but the key to Trecartin’s success is his indelibly strong grasp on the fragmented cacophony he creates. His execution is so meticulous that, combined with the excellent performances (especially the artist’s own), lovingly hand-crafted production deisgn, and hilariously lyrical dialogue, Trecartin’s videos become viscerally resonating trascendental experiences.

The impulsive, manic logic ruling the otherworldly language of Trecartin’s videos is an unsettlingly distorted one, to be sure, but not to the point of becoming indecipherable. Watching a Ryan Trecartin video flexes the same mental muscles that help you decode a 13-year-old’s instant message, or unravel the mysteries of an autistic outsider artist’s cryptic canvas. The generation currently coming of age possesses mutant superpowers of critical thinking– a propoensity for shifting semiotic fundamentals without flinching– thanks to the unassuming interference of the Internet. Ryan Trecartin is making art that allows us to put those fledgling powers to work.

Trecartin’s latest epic, Sibling Topics: (Section A and Section B), is the centerpiece of The New Museum’s triennial celebrating artists below the age of 33, Younger Than Jesus. The exhibit, which closes July 5th, also showcases work from Cory Arcangel, Cao Fei, Brendan Fowler and dozens of other trippendicular pretty young things. Check out Trecartin’s feature length 2007 video below, I-Be AREA.

There’s no doubt: Everything Is Terrible is the funniest and most depressing collection of found footage Cyberspace has ever seen. The group of video artists that contributes to the site keep it simple: each clip is a highlight reel of pure insanity usually culled from a single infomercial, self-improvement tape or edutainment special. Without straying too far from the source material, Everything is Terrible cuts through the filler to tastefully underscore the horror and hilarity of these all-but-forgotten bargain bin VHS marvels. While the dated, low-budget anonymity inherent in these clips makes it easy to feel distanced from the subjects of Everything Is Terrible’s playful scorn, the implicit message in all this admirable work seems to be: whenever it was made, no matter how professional it looks, just about anything can be awesomely awful– so learn to enjoy it!

The collective’s first feature-length DVD, Everything Is Terrible: The Movie, hits mailboxes tomorrow. To celebrate the release, the entire EIT gang is appearing in person tomorrow night for a special presentation at (where else?) The Silent Movie Theatre.

Slugs vs. three-dimensional grids! Birds vs. board rooms! Deserts vs. office buildings! The battle between the wild, untamed heart of nature and the cold, pragmatic logic of modernist design is heating up in the work of Dutch artist Semâ Bekirovic. Working in video, photography and sculpture, Bekirovic demonstrates a knack for mirthful experimentation, tackling themes of spontaneity and control, and mixing mysteries of the artificial and organic variety to create an atmosphere of carefully measured absurdity.

Semâ was kind enough to answer a few questions for our ongoing series of Where the Wild Things Are micro-questionnaires.

Is Where the Wild Things Are popular in The Netherlands? What do you remember about it from your childhood?

Where the Wild Things Are is called Max en de Maximonsters here. I remember my sister and me loving the book. We saw a childrens’ musical of it when I was six or so. I remember being quite enchanted by it. My sister and I used to stage plays with monsters in them ourselves.

I remember trying to stack three classmates on top of each other to fit in a homemade dragon costume, and how they tumbled out of it on stage. We always finished the costumes and props at the last possible moment, so there was never time for rehearsals. So our plays always ended up as text-less chaotic performances with lots of amazing props.

The contrast between nature and culture seems to be a strong theme in your work. Growing up, were you captivated by the idea of escaping your bedroom for an untamed wilderness, like Max does in the book?

Yes, but my sister and I (we were a team) would actually escape, usually. We would, for example, take our bikes and try to cycle to Belgium (which is about 300 kilometres from where we lived) and end up getting lost in some suburb of Amsterdam by the end of the day. We would ask a passerby for the way back home and by the time we got back in the middle of the night, we would find our mother in a state of near collapse. She had to call the cops quite a few times to look for us. We always thought she exaggerated.

But when I look back I guess we were quite out of control.

Astrid Lindgren or Hans Christian Andersen?

Pippi!

In the past few years, there’s been a popular trend in the art world towards appropriating the aesthetic of the Internet’s early days– deriving nostalgia from the quaint visual follies of a once-fledgling network that has now become predictably slick and refined. On the cutting edge of cyberspace homage, artist Stephanie Davidson works in collage, painting and video (check out her awesomely abstract SNL recap)– but some of her best work is in the unlikely medium of the animated GIF. GIF, perhaps the lowest-tech of motion graphics formats, was once thought to be limited to the realm of trifling novelty, like 19th century steroscopy.

Indeed, the format is probably most widely known for powering The Hampster Dance and slow-mo analysis of Tyra Banks’ face. But the GIFs Davidson makes are unique: landing somewhere in between living collages and microscopic films, Davidson uses found photographs and neon patterns to create eye candy with substance. Her GIFs each have a unique sense of place and mood, often contradicting or obscuring the intentions of the source material. And, well, they’re kind of hilarious.

This clip for Beautiful Swimmers’ single “O Yea,” uses found footage from an 80s workout tape and then processes it through a seemingly simple ghosting effect that hearkens back to some of the earliest experiments in video art. In concept, it all seems pretty par for the course– and yet the end result is more than the sum of its parts. Thanks to some skillful editing by Aurora Halal and Ashiq Khondker, the video exudes a glittering and glitchy charm that matches the song perfectly.