In Ready, Wait, played by Trecartin, is introduced as the eponymous figure of the series. Wait waits. He forsakes a "career" in favor of a "job," the execution of which Trecartin calls a "work performance." A careerist like Y-Ready (Veronica Gelbaum) may call the shots, but she is locked in her own endless narcissistic ascent, whereas Wait can retire from his job at anytime, and does, only to come back from vacation marked for containment. A third type of worker, Able (Lizzie Fitch), more fluidly adopts and discards the gestures of job and career, positing herself as a hobbyist who contrives the situations and outcomes she needs to keep her wave going. "Transumerism," or consumerism driven by experience, is introduced as a central theme of Any Ever and underlies the plight of JJ, a painted pant-suited guru with an addiction not mood enhancers, but intangible products that offer transient psyches wholesale. As JJ imbibes different personalities, a battery of digital filters lifted from commercial editing programs conjure a kaleidoscopic havoc that guides the characters toward calamity. Meanwhile, clashes between painting and digital art and between careerism as a means of actualizing and subverting the self, establish the voice of creativity as a vulnerable protagonist that is taken under fire by the chaos.

-- Kevin McGarry