2007
Video HD, 108’, 6’’
The logic that twirls the fiendishly tortuous narrative of I-BE AREA (2007), is grounded in a powerful understanding of our new millennial world as composed of manifold realities that are created, copied, or canceled at the will of life’s advanced players. The guiding drama of the video is how the ensemble cast of shifting, splintered identities exploits, submits to, or breaks free of the existential frictions caused by inhabiting multiple realities at once—through different public personas, online avatars, the ongoing lives of cloned versions of yourself (or, if you happen to be a clone, any new identities you download for yourself), the erasures of previous identities that have been overwritten, or the old standby of children serving as vessels for anything you’ve ever wanted to be but aren’t. An “Area” functions as a coalescence of a character’s accumulated realities, the turf to which the character is symbiotically and metaphysically bonded. The course of the film is a complete unraveling of I-Be’s Area, which is to say of itself. — Kevin McGarry