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Michael Betancourt | |
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| Born | 1971 New Jersey, US |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Temple University University of Miami |
| Known for | film maker, installation art, video art, visual music |
Michael Betancourt (born 1971) is a critical theorist, film theorist, art & film historian, and animator. His principal published works focus on the critique of digital capitalism, motion graphics, visual music, new media art, theory, and formalist study of motion pictures.
Betancourt was born in New Jersey in 1971. He enrolled at Temple University for film studies and received an MA in Film Studies at the University of Miami, studying under film historian William Rothman. He also received his Ph.D degree from the University of Miami in Interdisciplinary Studies, focusing on Art History, Communications/Film Studies, and History.
In addition to scholarly work, he has written popular articles and reviews on art, art theory, and culture for magazines, including The Atlantic,Make Magazine,Miami Art Exchange and Art Scene.
Betancourt's father is the archaeologist Philip P. Betancourt and his brother is the author John Gregory Betancourt. Michael spent his summers in both Crete and Greece and worked as a photographer on his father's excavation at Pseira.
His first film exhibition was Archaeomodern, shown at the Ann Arbor Festival of Experimental Film in 1993. In 1995, his film, a self-referential film in 30 sentences, won a Director's Citation award at the Black Maria Film Festival. Other works have screened in Art Basel Miami Beach, Contemporary Art Ruhr, Athens Video Art Festival, Festival des Cinemas Differents de Paris, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, the San Francisco Cinematheque's Crossroads, and Experiments in Cinema, among others. His video Telemetry screened as an installation during the first Athens Video Art Festival. Other installations were site-specific: as part of Art Basel Miami Beach, the Sites-Miami project in 2004, and at the South Florida Art Center's 800 Lincoln Road exhibition space as part of the Face-to-Face series in 2011.
Betancourt is both a historian and practitioner of visual music. He exhibited his videos at visual music showcases such as the iotaCenter and SoundImageSound. He created a system for designing abstract animations based on synesthesia [1] that he uses in his animations.
Betancourt discovered that the inventor Mary Hallock-Greenewalt produced the earliest hand-painted films known to exist; [2] [ page needed ] these were used with the earliest version of her Sarabet machine that automatically synchronized colored lights with records. The Sarabet device was an early music visualizer of the type now included with computer audio-players. Even though these films were not designed to be motion pictures themselves, they were created with templates and aerosol sprays, which produced repeating geometric patterns in the same way as the hand-painted films of Len Lye from the 1930s.
He wrote a short monograph and a large collection of short essays, pictures, and other archival material about the visual music group Lumonics composed of Mel and Dorothy Tanner of South Florida.
Most of his other visual music-related scholarships take the form of anthologies of technology patents or reprints of earlier texts on visual music machines designed for live performance.
Using psychological studies of motion perception, Betancourt argued [3] that the motion seen in motion pictures is identical to the motion seen in paintings. He terms this second type painterly motion and argues that the subjective viewer invents both kinds: "Unlike motion in the real world that is physically eminent, the motion we see in movies and through the technique of painterly motion is entirely a result of human perception. The motion we see does not exist outside our perception."[ citation needed ] Work by painters Francis Bacon and Peter Paul Rubens present the type of motion effect identified by Betancourt as being psychologically the same as the real motion of actual objects in the world. [4]
Betancourt's construction of formalism suggests a broader scope for applications of film theory than simply motion pictures since it focuses on both painting and experimental film. This approach was developed in his book, Structuring Time: notes on making movies. He approaches the motion picture as a series of distinct, but related domains of aesthetic manipulation: camera, image, editing, projection, screen, and sound. His construction of formalist motion pictures argues against a medium-specific definition and chooses a broad description of formal potentials instead. [5]
Betancourt has written about glitch art as both an artist and a critic and employs glitches in his videos. José Manuel García Perera, a Universidad de Sevilla painting professor, criticized Betancourt's work with glitch, stating:
Michael Betancourt's video work, part of the so-called glitch art, which focuses on the failure that can occur within the digital realm, has been here the basis for a comparative study between different concepts of movement in art, as well as between a current and a past art, a comparison that allows us to see clearly how technological advances have produced radical changes in the physical, spatial and mobile nature of the artwork. Betancourt's investigation proposes a new kinetic art that becomes critical through error, mimics the real-time movement that contemporary culture demands, and uncovers the artificiality of images that mimic reality as if they wanted to replace it." [6]
The use of glitch art to create critical media is a focus of Betancourt's theoretical writing on glitch art. [7]
David Finkelstein, in writing about his glitch video series Going Somewhere on Film International, stated:
In Betancourt's hands, data moshing becomes a form of cultural resistance. Instead of utilizing the smooth, illusionistic motion of digital cinema, which you would typically see in a commercial movie theater, he deliberately pulls apart the codes and exploits its errors to deconstruct the movies and show us how they do their tricks. He pulls apart the narrative tropes of Sci-Fi at the same time that he pulls apart the pictures, pixel by pixel, creating a radically open form that resists the hypnotic myth-making of Hollywood. [8]
In a series of articles collected as The Critique of Digital Capitalism, Betancourt criticized what he called the "immaterialism" of digital technology, specifically the claims that digital technology ends scarcity through being able to create value without expenditure, unlike the reality of limited resources, time, and expenses; it is based on denying the actual costs of access, creation, production, and maintenance of computer networks and technologies. He sees the "aura of the digital" as both the capitalist fantasy of continuous expansion made possible by digital technology and as the anti-capitalism fantasy of a world without scarcity or needs for capitalist production. [9]
Betancourt's concept of the "aura of information" is the separation made possible by digital technology of the information and the ways that information is carried by technology. This idea claims the digital transcends physical form by separating meaning from the physical objects that present meaningful information to its audience. It is the tendency to ignore the particular physical details of how we encounter information, in favor of just paying attention to the information itself. [10]
In "Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism", Betancourt proposed that the illusion of a rupture between physical and virtual production posed by the aura of the digital can be observed in the political economy of the United States, most especially in the Housing Bubble that burst in 2008. His analysis states that "Financial 'bubbles' are an inevitable result of a systemic shift focused on the generation of value through the semiotic exchange and transfer of immaterial assets." [11] Several features marked this economy: (1) a disassociation between the physical commodity and its representation in financial markets that is global in scope, (2) a reliance on fiat currency, (3) a financialization of the economy based on debt.
Part of this analysis is a discussion of the relationship between affective labor and what he has termed "agnotologic capitalism." Affective labor is the enabler for the creation of the bubbles that are characteristic of the digital capitalist economy, Where the reduction of alienation is a precondition for the elimination of dissent. Affective labor is part of a larger activity where the population is distracted by affective pursuits and fantasies of economic advancement.
Automation is a recurring theme in Betancourt's discussion of digital technology and capitalism. In his discussion of the New Aesthetic, he argued that the transformations of production being created by computers and automated assembly lines belong to a larger shift in the digital capitalist economy:
The various artifacts brought together as the 'new aesthetic' are united by their orientation not towards human observation or functional utility, but rather by their invocation of productive values without human action -- the aura of the digital's separation of product from all that is required to produce it: labor, capital, resources. This transition point marks a shift from the fragmentation of the assembly-line where tasks are organized around the repetitive action of masses of human labor (itself an organization that implies semiotic disassembly and standardization) to an automated fabrication where the design is generated on digital machines and then implemented by other digital machines without human labor in the fracture process; the necessity of human-as-designer thus comes into question as it is the only aspect of non-machine agency remaining, an element whose necessity is challenged by evolutionary algorithms and automated design. [12]
The replacement of human labor by automation poses a problem for capitalism according to Betancourt because capitalism is dependent on the exchange of labor for wages that are then spent purchasing the production of that labor. The elimination of labor by automation follows what Betancourt has called a fundamental law of the ideology of automation: "Anything that can be automated, will be." [12] [lower-alpha 1] Following the automation of physical production, the transformation of formerly intellectual labor by "autonomous production that began as a "labor-saving" procedure now saves all human labor in/as the productive machine: it is this specific dimension of automated (immaterial) labor using digital technology that reflects an ideology of production-without-consumption." [12] The elimination of labor by automated labor presents a paradox for Betancourt's digital capitalism because the wages paid to workers for their labor are the basic element around which all of capitalism is built.
Betancourt's movies are usually abstract and belong to the tradition of visual music. He has claimed these videos are related to his work as a theorist. [13] He has exhibited his work since 1992 when Archaeomodern screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival; since then he has produced many videos that have screened on television and in festivals, galleries, and museums.
He described his video Telemetry as "a documentary whose subject is those things that fall outside our direct perception. It adopts an abstract form precisely because what is represented has no direct physical form... instead of our electronic intermediaries, satellite and deep-space probes, send back numerical data we interpret intellectually to understand what it is like in those places we cannot go, what those things we cannot see look like." [14] This concern with the relationship of scientific and speculative interpretations of space appears throughout his work. [15]
The Experimental TV Center's Video History Project has a biography. [lower-alpha 2]
Betancourt's Aesthetic Hazard is a public installation project that imitates the more common barrier tapes marked "Caution" or "Police Line - Do Not Cross," but instead states: Aesthetic Hazard--Do Not Look. He installed this project in a variety of locations in Miami and Chicago. [16] [17]
An image is a visual representation of something. An image can be a two-dimensional (2D) representation, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or a three-dimensional (3D) object, such as a carving or sculpture. An image may be displayed through other media, including projection on a surface, activation of electronic signals, or digital displays. Two-dimensional images can be still or animated. Still, images can usually be reproduced through mechanical means, such as photography, printmaking or photocopying. Sometimes, three-dimensional images may also be animated.
In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies a genre of art, an experimental work of art, and the experimental artist who created the work of art, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus how the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.
Noise music is a genre of music that is characterised by the expressive use of noise. This type of music tends to challenge the distinction that is made in conventional musical practices between musical and non-musical sound. Noise music includes a wide range of musical styles and sound-based creative practices that feature noise as a primary aspect.
Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia, particularly involving video are described as postmodern.
Glitch is a genre of electronic music that emerged in the 1990s which is distinguished by the deliberate use of glitch-based audio media and other sonic artifacts.
Postdigital, in artistic practice, is an attitude that is more concerned with being human, than with being digital, similar to the concept of "undigital" introduced in 1995, where technology and society advances beyond digital limitations to achieve a totally fluid multimediated reality that is free from artefacts of digital computation.
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
The Cornell University Library is the library system of Cornell University. As of 2014, it holds over 8 million printed volumes and over a million ebooks. More than 90 percent of its current 120,000 periodical titles are available online. It has 8.5 million microfilms and microfiches, more than 71,000 cubic feet (2,000 m3) of manuscripts, and close to 500,000 other materials, including motion pictures, DVDs, sound recordings, and computer files in its collections, in addition to extensive digital resources and the University Archives. It is the sixteenth largest library in North America, ranked by number of volumes held. It is also the thirteenth largest research library in the U.S. by both titles and volumes held.
A work of art, artwork, art piece, piece of art or art object is an artistic creation of aesthetic value. Except for "work of art", which may be used of any work regarded as art in its widest sense, including works from literature and music, these terms apply principally to tangible, physical forms of visual art:
Affective labor is work carried out that is intended to produce or modify emotional experiences in people. This is in contrast to emotional labor, which is intended to produce or modify one's own emotional experiences. Coming out of Autonomist feminist critiques of marginalized and so-called "invisible" labor, it has been the focus of critical discussions by, e.g., Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Juan Martin Prada, and Michael Betancourt.
Applied aesthetics is the application of the branch of philosophy of aesthetics to cultural constructs. In a variety of fields, artifacts are created that have both practical functionality and aesthetic affectation. In some cases, aesthetics is primary, and in others, functionality is primary. At best, the two needs are synergistic, in which "beauty" makes an artifact work better, or in which more functional artifacts are appreciated as aesthetically pleasing. This achievement of form and function, of art and science, of beauty and usefulness, is the primary goal of design, in all of its domains.
Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word is a work of literary and cultural studies by Michael North, a professor of English at UCLA. It is the winner of the 2006 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.
Mark Boswell is the founder and leading theorist of the NOVA-KINO experimental cinema movement.
Scott Bartlett was one of the premiere abstract/experimental cinematic artists of the late 1960s and the 1970s. His acclaimed work, such as his intensely abstract 16mm movie Moon 1969, is greatly admired by many movie directors, including Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. His notable abstract movies and visual avant-garde motion pictures includes Serpent, Medina, Metanomen, Lovemaking, and the poignant interior documentary 1970. His 1967-1972 experiment OffOn, shot on 16mm, was groundbreaking for its use of new video imagery technologies.
Glitch art is the practice of using digital or analog errors for aesthetic purposes by either corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. Glitches appear in visual art such as the film A Colour Box (1935) by Len Lye, the video sculpture TV Magnet (1965) by Nam June Paik and more contemporary work such as Panasonic TH-42PWD8UK Plasma Screen Burn (2007) by Cory Arcangel.
Robert Carlton Breer was an American experimental filmmaker, painter, and sculptor.
Digital Performance refers to the use of computers as an interface between a creator, consumer of images, and sounds in a wide range of artistic applications. It is performance that incorporates and integrates computer technologies and techniques. Performers can incorporate multimedia into any type of production whether it is live on a theatre stage, or in the street. Anything as small as video recordings or a visual image classifies the production as multimedia. When the key role in a performance is the technologies, it is considered a digital performance. This can be as simple as making projections on a screen for a live audience or as complex as planning and putting on a show online.
The New Aesthetic is a term coined by James Bridle used to refer to the increasing appearance of digital technology and the Internet in the physical world, and the blending of virtual and physical. The phenomenon has been around for a long time but James Bridle articulated the notion through a series of talks and observations. The term gained wider attention following a panel at the SXSW conference in 2012.
Non-narrative film is an aesthetic of cinematic film that does not narrate, or relate "an event, whether real or imaginary". It is usually a form of art film or experimental film, not made for mass entertainment.
Media related to Michael Betancourt at Wikimedia Commons
