Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin, Zabludowicz Collection - exhibition review: 'as maddening and abhorrent as it is compelling'

To illustrate the strangeness of this exhibition, here’s an isolated quote from more than two hours of intense video installations. “My stunt chickens,” one character boasts, “know how to jump off a moped onto a moving truck.”

Welcome to Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin’s world, in which stunt chickens, real or animated, are the tip of the iceberg. Fitch and Trecartin are hot art-world properties. In LA they create theatrical environments that surround Trecartin’s HD videos, which he calls movies.

Priority Innfield is a series of related installations, much of them set in a future where human beings have evolved into animations. In Item Falls (2013) they audition to join a “gaming system” that’s also a university. Stunts are just one way they do this.

Confused? Don’t worry; Trecartin’s videos aren’t straight narratives. And that’s the point, because though they’re notionally about the future, they’re hugely informed by the fragmented, artificial and self-regarding present found on social media. A clue to the origins of Trecartin’s interest is in his film, Junior War, featuring his drunken high-school colleagues playing up to the camera as they engage in hi-jinks and petty vandalism.

In the fictional films, a cast of wigged, made-up and often digitally enhanced characters perform for each other or the camera, like YouTube self-portraitists. Their speech is treated with effects to slow it down or speed it up, their sentences are sampled and looped. With scattergun editing, floating CGI figures and animated objects, and a pounding soundtrack of trance and hip-hop beats, as well as mobile ringtones, it’s so pacey and intense you feel you’re caught in a g-force.

It’s as maddening and abhorrent as it is compelling. But after Fitch and Trecartin’s two-hour assault on my senses, I needed a lie down.

Until Dec 21 (020 7428 8940, zabludowiczcollection.com)