Glitch Movies by Michael Betancourt on Blu-Ray

story © Michael Betancourt | published January 13, 2022 | permalink |  |  

Michael Betancourt is a Glitch Art pioneer who began manipulating digital errors in 1990. This US$20.00 collection surveys his HD movies.

These movies have shown in film festivals, art fairs, and galleries internationally, influencing the use of glitches in popular culture (such as in the title sequence to Amazon's sci-fi program The Expanse).

You can get the collection here:
https://www.michaelbetancourt.com/available/michael-betancourt-blueray.html

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story © Michael Betancourt | published December 31, 2021 | permalink |  |  

One of the problems with teaching during the pandemic 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 2, 2021 | permalink |  |  

If one rejects or questions that idea that cinema can function as a metaphor for interior experience through the abstraction of the image, what remains to consider? This idea of cinema-as-metaphor is deeply ingrained in the aesthetics of “avant-garde cinema” and is one of the reasons for its fetishing of celluloid in opposition to electronic video and digital technologies. This heritage of Stan Brakhage’s work continues to haunt this genre of production twenty years after his death, effectively holding the third major variety of cinematic production, the poetic, to a set of aesthetics and propositions that were never as restrictive when they were proposed as they have become now that celluloid is obsolete.

story © Michael Betancourt | published October 12, 2021 | permalink |  |  

Now available for Pre-Order from amazon.com! The Instaglitch Project presents a selection of 52 full color images from Michael Betancourt's "Instaglitch Project" that exploited the aberrant and unheimlich results of image handling and processing by the Instagram photosharing app-it derived novel examples of Glitch Art from the faults inherent to the iPhone system. This project uses these inconsistencies as a mechanism for aesthetic creation that provides evidence for the fantasy of control that the "walled garden" of apps create. The development of the Instaglitch offers a counter to this hegemonic ideology via a studio practice that exploits the Instagram app's very limited 'degrees of freedom' without altering the app itself or employing less restrictive software. These works are examples of how repeated processing and 'filtering' of the same image within the same system-a feedback loop-magnifies the instabilities inherent in its operations. The 2,600 works in this series of static images demonstrates programmatic failures that are masked by its normal use, but are systemic instabilities-their identification allowed me to generate works by manipulating their impacts on a blank (white) image.

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 17, 2021 | permalink |  |  

My new book Research Art: glitches, poetics, typography and the aura of the digital is now available from amazon.com! Full color illos, and only $24.95!

This book discusses linking theory and practice in a larger context of conceptual and theoretical concerns that are neither a statement of intentions, nor merely a subjective series of claims about past accomplishments. With 21 illustrations in full color, this book discusses his digital glitch movies, typoetry, abstract photography, and the Instaglitch series as direct examples of the connections between theory and practice, illuminating his proposal for "Research Art" as a domain equal to the "Business Art" familiar from exhibitions in the gallery-fair-museum network. Polemical and often challenging, it explores the role of expectations in making and interpreting art from the vantage point of the studio, rather than as a critic or historian, arguing that "Research Art" is the evolution of the critical position developed by Conceptual Art and Situationalism as the avant-garde program in art came to an end, an adaptation to the changed Contemporary reality of AI, globalization, and digital technology, an oppositional art made in the shadows of digital capitalism.