These posts present portions of Michael Betancourt's current research. If you are looking for his published media history and theory articles, you can find them posted in .pdf and with links to the magazines, under "articles" on MichaelBetancourt.com:

"The Invention of Glitch Video: Digital TV Dinner (1978)

The 3 Periods of Abstract Film & Video in the US

Commentary on misinformation about my research

Interesting primary source documents:

The Last of the Mohicans: Oskar Fischinger’s “Symphony in Blue”, FilmLiga, 15 November 1935, pp. 314-315 [.pdf]

Dreams That Money Can Buy, Hans Richter, 1947 [.pdf]

Tinting and Toning of Eastman Positive Motion Picture Film, second edition, 1918 [.pdf]

More articles and translations into Spanish, Portuguese and Greek are posted on MichaelBetancourt.com

FYI: a Partial Pre-History of Glitch Art

story © Michael Betancourt | published April 27, 2023 | permalink |  |  

Glitch Art has claimed an extensive history of precedents and sources throughout both art history and media art. The contemporary use of digital glitches as a source of aesthetic and expressive imagery emerges from the lineage of avant-garde exploits of media and technology in the early twentieth century, and before that, the concerns of the Arts and Crafts movement with demonstrations of the 'human hand' in art making during the nineteenth century.

This small (and incomplete) selection highlights artists working at the end of the twentieth century who were employing glitches self-consciously in their work, but were active before, or apart from, the later social media groups on Flickr and Facebook that consolidated and brought the idea of glitches-as-art into general public consciousness. It should not be considered an exhausive, final or even complete presentation of the early artists pioneering glitches and Glitch Art, but is instead offered as a sampling of the kinds and range of works being done.

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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 July 26, 2015 | permalink |  |  

Bright Lights Film Journal has my article on Johsua Gen Solondz's flicker film Prisoner's Cinema. This article discusses how the duplicity of hallucination/sight and transcendence/imprisonment is essnetial to the meaning in flicker cinema.

story © Michael Betancourt | published April 11, 2015 | permalink |  |  

The 10th Anniversay book from the Experiments in Cinema festival Un-Dependently Yours: Imagining a World Beyond the Red Carpet is out.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published February 13, 2015 | permalink |  |  

The Museum of Modern Art in New York began a bibliographic indexing project focused on the history and criticism of motion pictures with The New York City WPA Writer’s Project, following the organization of the museum’s “Film Library” in 1935. This project, developed over several years was completed as a three volume survey of English language publications about motion pictures in 1941.

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