2009 – 2010
Video HD, 11’, 47”
Re’Search Wait’S
Temp Stop, as the title implies, has a disjunctive quality that separates it from the other parts of Re’Search Wait’S. As if emanating from the basement of Any Ever, each scene plays like a hidden-away epilogue rendering characters comparatively surreal— in part because they are often straightforward and ordinary. The movie opens with a less omnipotent Y-Ready barking an abusive monologue to hypothetical subservients and bidding Able to use The Re’Search to brainwash JJ into a duplicate of Wait. Able’s work alter ego, Past Jessica, is battered by her office. She is out of time, and by that extension, timelessness in Any Ever is not equated with limitlessness but with total lack: no time. Then, in a dream, Past-Jessica repairs to nature with an emancipated Korea knockoff played by Trecartin. Though fleeting, viewers take in a gasp of stillness from this flora, air, and sun scored by poignant swelling. While clearly a fantasy in the context of the movie, the sequence could conversely be
the only waking moment of Any Ever’s whirling four hours. The idea of stopping of waiting repeatedly surfaces as a paradoxical theme across Re’Search Wait’S. It is weakness while a discontented Wait waits for opportunities and others snatch them; but in order to halt the constant motion of automated ambition, to pause and engage with a real place and time, waiting is also the ultimate strength that lends characters constancy in a sea of constant change. — Kevin McGarry
Re’Search Wait’S comprises four movies: Ready,The Re’Search, Roamie View: History Enhancement, and Temp Stop. The setting of this other side of the Any Ever diptych is a complicated industry predicated on the supremacy of metaphysically evolved market research. The base commodities are personality traits; while ordinarily they are considered malleable, here they ossify into static examples (“examplize,” to use Trecartin’s term) that can be traded among owners. […] As a picture of modern consumer society literalized to an extreme, Re’Search Wait’S verges on social science-fiction; and by examplizing Any Ever’s other half into fuel for their own stories, these works tie the seven together as a yin and yang of nihilism and boundless meaning. — Kevin McGarry
