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 ‘What’s that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?’ Marshall McLuhan   1: Your Original Is Having A Complete Human Change Meltdown Makeover   It’s difficult to describe Ryan Trecartin’s work without sounding hopelessly overwhelmed I want to say a load of finger-snappy stuff like ‘Imagine if Hieronymus Bosch and Keith Haring got together and made a movie,’ or ‘If Facebook had a nightmare, it would look like this’ I’m even tempted to deploy a heinous journalistic cliché, namely the description of an object, event or experience as ‘like [something familiar] on [some kind of drug]’ If there are drugs involved in the process, they aren’t the chemical variety – not LSD, let’s say, which might seem the obvious choice for such kaleidoscopic filmmaking – but something all-enveloping, a kind of image-rich amphetamine we hardly notice because we live in it, like fish in water   Trecartin is best known as a video artist, although he has worked in sculpture, installation and photography His films, which blend sitcomesque performance art with hypnotically garish digital collages, are confusing in the extreme The first time I saw Popular Sky, for example, it induced the kind of nerve-tingling reaction I’d often read about but rarely experienced The interpretive tools that TV and cinema equip us with are useless here Try to decode a plot from the tempest of signs and signifiers, or attempt to ‘read’ character in any remotely Freudian sense, and you’ll end up with a headache My advice: just roll with it, let the images jitter by, and pay attention to the way your brain responds   Composed using widely available editing software (his first films were edited on iMovie), Trecartin’s films flicker like straight-to-tape renditions of an oversaturated world They star tribes of kids and tricksters whose speech is articulate yet schizophasic, a patois of home-brewed slang, corporate buzzwords and chat-room inanities that blend and stutter like the unmediated mutterings of the digital unconscious These films appear to be about as narrative-led as a computer meltdown, but they are undeniably compelling   The choice of film over painting or installation, say, is apt for someone who grew