Editing as a Performative and Collaborative Practice. Ryan Trecartin's Hectic Video Collages

This contribution examines editing as an art practice focusing on Ryan Trecartin’s work. Trecartin is definitely one of those artists among the younger generations who is experimenting in a more radical and crosswise manner with the new media and the opportunities of using, sharing and mobilizing images offered by the Internet, beyond copyright and the proper citation of “poached” materials. In Trecartin’s videos, images, sounds and words are assembled in a digital hypertext − schizophrenic and hypnotic − of which the artist is the main but not exclusive author. The analysis focuses on central aspects of Trecartin’s practice, such as the supposed re-materialisation of the art object related to the idea of “an Internet of things”; the visual re-codification that generates new aesthetic standards, such as the so-called “post-Internet style”; and co-working as a contemporary art practice and remedy to the “death of the author” that was pessimistically theorised throughout the 20th and 21st century.