Rav Casley Gera

We live in an uber-digital age. 3.3 billion text messages were sent in the UK in the last month. Everyone from U2 to the Pope has commented at length on the never-ending sea of media messages that buzz, pop and bleep over us from the moment we wake to the moment we sleep at night – and even in between.

So it takes skill and inspiration to make a comment on on this brave new world that makes an impact. Which makes the work of New York mix artist Christian Marclay even more impressive. His 2003 piece Video Quartet, recently granted a proper room in the rehanging of Tate Modern, makes for a startling evocation of media overload: startling not for its technical skill or apparently sage commentary, as with so many pieces on similar themes, but for its humour and humanity.

Consisting of four adjacent screens, each with an independent soundtrack, showing clips from various musical films and TV shows and televised concerts, the work doesn’t differ in form from other media-collage. Its effect, at first, seems simply like a mash-up mix CD with video; 2 Many DJs TV, almost. However, the piece’s ebbs and flows generate a remarkably strong emotional reaction. Four co-ordinated bursts of energy- frenetic jazz solos, gunshot percussion and the combined vocals of Louis Armstrong and Julie Andrews, for example – will give sudden way to moments of calm, with fingers on tables and lone voices maintaining the flow. Yet there is never silence, until the end of the 13-minute piece; with the coming of each lull in activity begins a crescendo which will usher in the next movement. It’s these moments – impossible to explain, to be honest – that give the piece its power.

Unlike the Technicolor ad-fest portrayed in the likes of Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, Minority Report, or Falk Richter’s Electronic City, our lives are not a constant stream of intrusive images and blaring noise. No, not even if you live in Manhattan, I’m informed. Rather, the pernicious influence of “always-on” comes not from its in-your-face brashness, but from its subtlety. It’s not the fifteen ringing mobile phones in the street that spoil your day; it’s the one that goes off in the gallery; the phone call when you’ve just got in the bath. It’s the squeeze placed on moments we used to reserve for quiet that makes technology an uncomfortable companion. The shifting pace of Video Quartet means that it mirrors our lives more truly than any frenetic Microsoft-advert speeded-up-video portrayal. But that trumpet, that hiss, that note, that sits quietly, but always getting louder, underneath every lull in the action, is what makes Video Quartet really relevant.

[ Video Quartet is at Tate Modern now]