Ryan Trecartin
The Re’Search (Re’Search Wait’S)
Merve Verlag
2017
11,8 x 17 cm, 360 pages
German / English
Translation Tobias Haberkorn
In the context of the world premiere of Ryan Trecartin’s screenplay at the Munich Kammerspiele in 2017 the bilingual edition of The Re’Search (Re’Search Wait’S) is described as “a literary work of art from the (near) future”.
Any Ever
A yin and yang of nihilism and boundless meaning
Any Ever comprises seven autonomous but interrelated videos. The work is structured as a diptych, with
Trill-ogy Comp (three movies: K-CoreaINC.K (section a); Sibling Topics (section a); and P.opular S.ky (section ish)) as one side and
Re’Search Wait’S (four movies: Ready, The Re’Search, Roamie View : History Enhancement, and Temp Stop) as the other.
Any Ever’s core material is the perpetual flux of relationships among characters patterned to form constellations of meaning across videos. The individual videos fit together, block, break, orbit, or attract one another in infinite shifting combinations.
Up close, the dynamics between video characters confuse the movies’ connections to space and time, extending the condition of synesthesia from the five senses to the laws of physics. Events that transpire during the videos serve only as backdated markers of possibilities. Each of these possibilities, by definition, could have unfolded in countless other ways. “Cause and effect,” in this world, are simply brackets around these junctures of possible action. The philosophical tenet that one becomes everything one thinks, says, and does is both immediate and absolute in the work; Any Ever’s setting is simultaneity, in which being and becoming, along with everything else, co-exist.
The Re’Search is a tween-aged microcosm of Any Ever. The movie is actual market research collected by Wait for Y-Ready. It doubles as the site of Wait’s vacation, as well as echoed versions of scenarios from other sections of Any Ever from which characters either reappear or are replicated here as young girls.
(Text adapted from writing by Kevin McGarry)