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, 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 book The Critique of Digital Capitalism. This analysis identifies how digital technology has captured contemporary society in a reification of capitalist priorities. 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.

Now Available! in print and ebook format

“What exactly does AI automate?”

Betancourt begins with the obvious answer, ‘human labor,’ and ends with the nature of value created in capitalism. His analysis was written for a lecture at the Aspen Institute–Germany conference “Humanity Enabled: AI & the Great Economic Awakening” in Berlin on March 25-26, 2020. The ‘great decoupling’ of labor from productivity and value suggests the potential for a post-labor economy, and the expansion of the ‘society of leisure’ formerly reserved for only the dominant social classes. This book concerns the social, cultural, and economic barriers to the development of a fairer, egalitarian, and more democratic society in terms of a broad, kaleidoscopic array of tendencies including the gamification of social activity by social credit, the role of marketing in popular media, the authoritarian usurpation of democracy in the smart city, and the proposal of universal basic income as a palliative for the replacement of human labor by machinery. Opposition to the emergence of the ‘society of leisure’ is not economic but cultural, a confluence of religious and social prohibitions on leisure that simultaneously devalue, demonize, and disenfranchise labor: this emergent conflict is the cultural significance of AI.

My new book Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequences, Motion Graphics and Cinema is now available! This book presents a new theory of cinematic realism appropriate for the digital age.

This book explores the question of realism in motion pictures. Specifically, it explores how understanding the role of realism in the history of title sequences in film can illuminate discussions raised by the advent of digital cinema.

Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequences, Motion Graphics and Cinema fills a critical theoretical void in the existing literature on motion graphics. Developed from careful analysis of André Bazin, Stanley Cavell, and Giles Deleuze’s approaches to cinematic realism, this analysis uses title sequences to engage the interface between narrative and non-narrative media to consider cinematic realism in depth through highly detailed close readings of the title sequences for Bullitt (1968), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), The Number 23 (2007), The Kingdom (2008), Blade Runner: 2049 (2017) and the James Bond films. This analysis develops a modal approach to cinematic realism where ontology is irrelevant to indexicality. His analysis shows the continuity between historical analogue film and contemporary digital motion pictures by developing a framework for rethinking how realism shapes interpretation.