Color as Signal / Noise

American video artist Ryan Trecartin is undeniably a “grinder and mixer of multicolor drugs,”¹ as Plato put it in reference to artists in general. His fashionable use of digital media, fast-paced editing, belligerent makeup and costume, and chaotic, broken, and synthesized dialogue echo his unforgiving color juxtapositions. His work emerged in the early 2000s, during a time when the art world was embracing a trickle-down of academic trends in post-media, post-identity politics, and queer theory. Beyond these already-theorized connections to the pre-existent cultural ethos, this chapter argues that Trecartin’s work sanctions the noisy colors of a newer world of selfies, social media apps, the Internet, and automated effects plug-ins through three strategies rooted in categorical transgression (in favor of noise and ambiguity); an aesthetic category I theorize as “accidental color”; and a use of whacky stops and pauses––in the tradition of the avant-garde–– to incite subject disorientation and criticality.