The New Alienation of Digital Capitalism

story © Michael Betancourt | published August 19, 2016 | permalink |  |  

Historically, alienation has been understood as a disassociation of an individual from their agency. It is a well-theorized result of industrial production and the assembly-line in particular, but is common to historical capitalism generally. In digital capitalism, a new type of alienation has arisen not based in disassociations of agency. This contemporary alienation originated with an apparent surplussage of agency created by digital systems. The new alienation resides not in a loss of agency, but in the insignificance of that agency. The aura of the digital’s separation of action from result reveals a this alienation in the paradoxical dispersal of efficacy and immediacy of control. Introducing a seemingly unbounded “agency,” it creates an alienation utterly distinct from that of historical capitalism. This changed alienation masquerades as fantasies of empowerment and autonomy associated with digital technologies.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published August 16, 2016 | permalink |  |  

The iotaCenter is showing my movie Antag|Protag at Artists Television Access in San Francisco as part of Chaos and Order.

Witness a collection of visual music from across time and from around the world that represent the spectrum of rationality. Order on the one side and chaos on the other. Are really polar opposites? Is there order in total chaos or chaos in highly organized forms? Tell them your thoughts in this night of films and discussion.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published July 16, 2016 | permalink |  |  

José Manuel García Perera, painting professor at Universidad de Sevilla, wrote an interesting article on my glitch work that was published earlier this year.

Abstract: In recent times, artistic creation has come closer to the media image proposed by Internet, thus seriously altering an aesthetic experience based before on movement of the viewer around the work and now defined by screens that induce passivity. 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.

The full article is available as a pdf online: "El movimiento como simulacro en el mundo virtual: Michael Betancourt y el arte de la inmediatez" published in Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie VII - Historia del Arte no. 4, 2016, pp. 143-158.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published July 6, 2016 | permalink |  |  

Film International published my article about Michael Morris' contemporary expanded cinema performances with film, video and digital technologies. The interpreted nature of the digital sound/image presented through the language of visual music is central to these works.

Michael Morris, Second Hermeneutic (2013)

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story © Michael Betancourt | published July 1, 2016 | permalink |  |  

The title sequence has been a common element in the presentation of motion pictures throughout their history in the United States. The organization of title sequences has varied greatly in complexity, duration and distinguishability from the central drama over the more than 125 years of motion picture production in the United States; the earliest examples were produced by Edison's Black Maria studio in the 1890s. These title sequences were minimal, a simple title card that served as a unique identifier for purposes of copyright registry; however, with the shift to dramatic, feature length narratives the need for text on screen became increasingly necessary to present dialogue and other narrative information.

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