Concepts of “Heavens and Earth” provide a visionary subtext to scientific exploration since culture is a layering, where new ideas and interpretations form “sedimentary layers” over earlier ones, contradicting them, forming new meanings for old symbols. This principle organizes the historical material in my book Two Women and a Nightengale (1996-2004) whose imagery is an explicit reference point for my later movies: Telemetry and the shorts Aurora (2001), Illumination (2001), Contact Light (2012) and the Dark Rift (2014). These ideas also emerge in my microwatt broadcast radio/video installation Reception/Transmission (2006). Unlike Telemetry, Contact Light and the Dark Rift, where the content of the movie directly addresses both space and the Moon, Star Fish (2012) and Helios | Divine (2013) both draw on this iconography, addressing the fantasy::reality dialectic posed by the Moon in an implicit fashion, through its double, the Sun. The reversibility of signifiers in these systems is what informs their organization in my movies.

José Manuel García Perera wrote a critical discussion of my work.

A selection of his movies can be seen on Cinegraphic, or on the Michael Betancourt vimeo channel, or you can find about more about them on his portfolio site, MichaelBetancourt.com.

new Listserv for Video Art!

story © Michael Betancourt | published August 18, 2021 | permalink |  |  

Listserv-VideoArt is an international forum for media art in all its forms: digital video, experimental video, avant-garde video, video art, video installation, light art, glitch art, visual music and visual poetry; video's expressive qualities, aside from or in addition to its storytelling capacity. Any genre of both digital and analogue video art, including diary, glitch, abstract, processed, animated, found footage, lyric, subversive, expanded, projection mapped, etc., can be discussed, as well as those movies which fall into the cracks between the genres, or those not covered by other lists.

All aspects of video art, from production to criticism, are acceptable in this context, including personal productions, techniques, histories and aesthetics of video art, critical discussions, new directions, courses and teaching, festivals, announcements of world-wide events in video art, exhibitions and retrospectives, exchanges of information, etc. This list is not intended for the discussion of commercial video or motion graphics, neither narrative film, nor documentary film, nor film as art, nor the history of avant-garde film.

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 6, 2018 | permalink |  |  

Going Somewhere: The Role Playing Game is a table top role playing game adapted from movie maker Michael Betancourt's avant-garde serial. Containing all the rules needed to play, this rule book is designed to provide hours of fun. Designed to simplify the complexity of RPGs to speed game play, these rules can be used for either SCI-FI or Fantasy campaigns.

Download it for Free or Buy a book from Amazon.com

read more (359 words)

story © Michael Betancourt | published December 6, 2017 | permalink |  |  

The interview about Going Somewhere begins on page 32 [pdf].

story © Michael Betancourt | published July 12, 2017 | permalink |  |  

David Finkelstein wrote a review of my movie serial Going Somewhere for Film International called "Recombinant Modification of Sci Fi – Going Somewhere (2015)" that's available online:

Something fascinating and strange is going on in Going Somewhere, an ongoing “movie serial” by Michael Betancourt, with individual episodes which are all 7 minutes long. The source material for these digital mini-epics comes from a variety of science and science fiction materials: old Grade Z Sci Fi epics, civil defense films and WWII documentaries, NASA footage. Betancourt uses sophisticated datamoshing and databending techniques to completely transform these materials. These techniques reach inside of the numbers which store digital video and mess up the data in more or less controlled ways that morph one image into the next. They allow Betancourt to radically change the original colors and forms.

Also available as a [pdf] for download

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 7, 2016 | permalink |  |  

OtherZine 31 is running my discussion of using digital tools to create a movie with the same kind of RGB-based generative color used by Len Lye in Rainbow Dance .