This site presents extracts from Michael Betancourt's current research and writing projects, with news about current developments. A portfolio of finished, published writing is available here.

His trilogy of studies on film theory using title sequences as a model uniting avant-garde, documentary and commercial motion pictures were published in the Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice series: Semiotics and Title Sequences, Synchronization and Title Sequences, and Title Sequences as Paratexts.

If you are looking for more on agnotology, digital capitalism, or automated/immaterial labor and AI, look at The Digital, which presents links to his most recently published articles and other research on the political economy of digital capitalism contained in his books The Critique of Digital Capitalism and Force Magnifier. This analysis identifies how digital technology has captured contemporary society in a reification of capitalist priorities that includes the shift to automation and AI. The theory proposed in this book is the description of how digital capitalism as an ideologically “invisible” framework is realized in technology.

You can watch his movies here.

The Post-Asemic Press has released the book GLITCHASEMICS by Marco Giovenale with an introduction by Michael Betancourt!

Asemic writing is a type of disturbed writing / écriture that cannot be read since it belongs to a completely unknown language, or a language that one is not capable of deciphering, like a set of glyphs or letters coming out of a long lost enigmatic script which resist any attempt at translation. If you disturb waves of asemic writing, it resembles a loud interrupting noise hitting a regular radio frequency signal, you get a double-coded text—or image text(ure)s, which double as chaotic graphic micro-events. In this realm is where the "Glitchasemics” dwell, with their shining overexposure to colors and extreme illuminated distortions, which also lead to bits of altered perceptions and flashes of already tangled alphabets. In this book there is no return to previously known languages, codes, or habits (even if they are experimental ones). From this point forward, the reader is left in this crossroad area of art and verbo-visual writing, and will encounter a post-literate path without explanation and/or translation, with its very identity asserting itself into the concept of translation, but remaining as an impossible task applied to impossible objects.