Formal Films?

story © Michael Betancourt | published July 2, 2004 | permalink |  |  

It's possible to think of the appearance of flicker films, leader-based films and other materially-linked films produced in the 1960s and 1970s not as a formalist reduction, but as a reaction to the emergence of video as an alternative to film.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published June 2, 2004 | permalink |  |  

Kallahar explains how he took a 10 hour video of driving and accellerated it to be a 6 minute video.

With sample clips.

story © Michael Betancourt | published April 2, 2004 | permalink |  |  

It makes a number of claims, but central to them is this obervation:

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story © Michael Betancourt | published September 19, 2003 | permalink |  |  

repost from The Miami Art Exchange [pdf]

There is a set of engineering issues that are common to all technological arts in the digital age: sampling,fragmentation and reassembly, data compression and expansion... and the glitch. We like the glitch, not because it formalistically reminds us what we are seeing is an artifact (it does), but because in our encounter and by developing our relationship to the glitch, we can enter into a dialogue with our technology on its own terms, negotiating for points of contact between what we-as-audience will accept and what we reject as technological failure, as an interruption to our fantasies of dominance, power,mastery.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published September 23, 1996 | permalink |  |  

The Gunz, 1996 (aka Gitchguns)

A spectacle of violence forms around the scene of the crime--the images of guns in the (increasingly) post-industrial world are arbiters of taste and fashion. They tell their viewers what is good and what should be desired. Within every potential there is its opposite: emergent in every birth is the ultimate death. To break an image is to reaffirm that in choosing any one thing is to deny all alternatives. This is the case with these images, taken from the combination of guns and commerce, created to influence the desires of those who see them with one specific purpose and a secondary, clandestine one. Immediately they want their audience to do something: it is not a passive buy this, go here, eat that; on another level they act to flatten out the experience of life by making all actions/desires equivalent. There are no higher or baser goals, only commerce, and any symbols, sacred or otherwise, can be used in the furtherance of this one goal.
(written 1996)