E-Book Versions for Online Classes

story © Michael Betancourt | published December 29, 2020 | permalink |  |  

One of the problems with teaching going online is the accessibility of textbooks. Here are links to ebook versions of some of my books for anyone who needs them:

The History of Motion Graphics

A Short Guide to Writing About Motion Graphics

Force Magnifier: The Cultural Impacts of Artificial Intelligence

Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics

Semiotics and Title Sequences: Text-Image Composites in Motion Graphics

Title Sequences as Paratexts: Narrative Anticipation and Recapitulation

Synchronization and Title Sequences: Audio-Visual Semiosis in Motion Graphics

Typography and Motion Graphics: The 'Reading-Image'

Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequences, Motion Graphics and Cinema

Beyond Spatial Montage: Windowing, or the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space

The Critique of Digital Capitalism

story © Michael Betancourt | published December 23, 2020 | permalink |  |  

This work of visual poetry is composed from forty-two carefully curated compositions produced between 1998 and 2020. Dissolution means the decomposition into fragments or parts, a disintegration that returns the established order to its component elements—but this breaking up does not mean an end to order, merely the conversion from one state to another, more dynamic one. These images are a meditation on this process of ordering and transformation. These images are a meditation on this process of ordering and transformation, a sequence of images, like an animation without the in-between frames.

story © Michael Betancourt | published December 7, 2020 | permalink |  |  

I will be giving a talk at the Aspen Institute-Germany conference "Humanity Enabled: AI & the Great Economic Accelleration" on December 8 on the structural barriers to the emergence of the 'society of leisure.' These are not economic but cultural, a confluence of religious and social prohibitions on leisure that simultaneously devalue, demonize, and disenfranchise labor.

The presentation slides can be downloaded here

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 10, 2020 | permalink |  |  

A vast, evil conspiracy is comforting. The paranoid belief in the capacity of authority to maintain itself and secretly dominate events provides an explanation—hidden power acting without oversight—that is easy to understand.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published August 3, 2020 | permalink |  |  

The Decadent Review has a short essay I wrote on abstract photography.

Abstract photographs undo any certainty about reality; there is nothing to return to, nothing to unmask. The abstract photograph is itself, not a depiction resembling something in the world. Those contents its audience might think they recognize becomes the same uncertain visualization that metamorphic images and optical illusions pose: while there is clearly an image, what it shows is open to discussion, moving within boundaries fixed in such a way that the images seen are not the image shown . . .