Michael Betancourt

Michael Betancourt
Born 1971 (1971)
New Jersey, USA
Nationality United States
Education Temple University, Philadelphia PA; University of Miami, Miami, FL
Known for film maker, installation art, video art, visual music

Michael Betancourt (born 1971) is a critical theorist, film theorist, art and film historian, and animator. His principal published works focus on the technologies of visual music, new media art and theory, and formalist study of motion pictures.

Betancourt's father is archaeologist Philip P. Betancourt, and his brother is author John Gregory Betancourt. He spent his summers in Crete, Greece, working as a photographer on his father's excavation at Pseira. His first film exhibition was Archaeomodern, shown in the Ann Arbor Festival of Experimental Film in 1993. In 1995, his film a self-referential film in 30 sentences won a Director's Citation award at the Black Maria Film Festival. Other works have screened in Art Basel Miami Beach, Contemporary Art Ruhr, Athens Video Art Festival, Festival des Cinemas Differents de Paris, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, the San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads, and Experiments in Cinema, among others. His video Telemetry screened as an installation during the first Athens Video Art Festival. Other installions were site-specific, as part of Art Basel Miami Beach: the Sites-Miami project in 2004, and at the South Florida Art Center’s 800 Lincoln Road exhibition space as part of the Face-to-Face series in 2011.

Early life and education

Betancourt was born in New Jersey in 1971. He attended Temple University in Philadelphia, PA to study motion pictures, and then received an MA in Film Studies at the University of Miami in Miami, FL studying under film historian William Rothman. He also received his Ph.D. from the University of Miami in Interdisciplinary Studies, focusing on Art History, Communications/Film Studies and History.

In addition to scholarly work, he has written popular articles and reviews on art, art theory and culture for The Atlantic, Make Magazine, Miami Art Exchange and Art Scene magazines.

Visual Music

Betancourt is both a historian and practitioner of visual music. He has exhibited his videos at visual music showcases such as the iotaCenter and SoundImageSound. He created a system for designing abstract animations based on synaesthesia, “Proposing a Taxonomy of Abstract Form Using Psychological Studies of Synaesthesia / Hallucinations” published by Leonardo magazine that he uses in his animations.

Betancourt has discovered that the inventor Mary Hallock-Greenewalt produced the earliest hand-painted films known to still exist.[1] However, these were not movies but films produced specifically to be performed by her earliest version of the Sarabet which was a machine for automatic accompaniment to records. This device was an early music visualizer of the type now included with computer audio-players. Even though these films were not designed to be motion pictures, they were produced with templates and aerosol sprays, producing repeating geometric patterns in the same way as the hand painted films of Len Lye from the 1930s.

He also wrote a short monograph, combined with a large collection of short essays, pictures and other archival material about the visual music group Lumonics that was organized and run by Mel and Dorothy Tanner in South Florida.

Most of his other visual music-related scholarship takes the form of anthologies of technology patents, or reprints of earlier texts on visual music machines designed for live performance.

Formalist Motion Pictures

Using psychological studies of motion perception, Betancourt has argued that the motion seen in motion pictures is identical to the motion seen in paintings. He terms this second type painterly motion and argues that both kinds are invented by the subjective viewer: "Unlike motion in the real world that is physically eminent, the motion we see in movies and through the technique of painterly motion is entirely a result of a human perception. The motion we see does not exist outside our perception." Work by painters Francis Bacon and Peter Paul Rubens present the type of motion effect identified by Betancourt as being psychologically the same as real motion of actual objects in the world.[2]

Betancourt's construction of formalism suggests a broader scope for applications of film theory than simply motion pictures since it focuses on both painting and experimental film. This approach was developed in his book, Structuring Time: notes on making movies. He approaches the motion picture as a series of distinct, but related domains of aesthetic manipulation: camera, image, editing, projection, screen, and sound. His construction of formalist motion pictures is one that argues against a medium-specific definition, choosing instead a broad description of formal potentials.

Glitch videos

Animated example of what a glitched video can look like by Michael Betancourt. (Mae Murray in a screen test)

Betancourt has written about glitch art as both an artist and a critic, and employs glitches in his videos. José Manuel García Perera, a Universidad de Sevilla painting professor, criticised Betancourt's work with glitch, stating that "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." [3] The use of glitch art to create critical media is a focus of Betancourt's theoretical writing on glitch art.

The Digital

In a series of articles starting with "The Aura of the Digital," collected as The Critique of Digital Capitalism, Betancourt has criticized what he called the “immaterialism” of digital technology, specifically the claims that digital technology ends scarcity through being able to create value without expenditure, unlike the reality of limited resources, time, expense. It is based on denying the actual costs of access, creation, production, and maintenance of computer networks and technologies. He sees the “aura of the digital” as both the capitalist fantasy of continuous expansion made possible by digital technology and as the anti-capitalism fantasy of a world without scarcity or need for capitalist production.[4]

The Aura of Information

Betancourt’s concept of the “aura of information” is the separation made possible by digital technology of the information and the ways that information is carried by technology. This idea claims the digital transcends physical form by separating meaning from the physical objects that present the meaningful information to its audience. It is the tendency to ignore the particular physical details of how we encounter information, in favor of just paying attention to the information itself.[5]

Digital Capitalism

In "Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism," Betancourt proposed that the illusion of a rupture between physical and virtual production posed by the aura of the digital can be observed in the political economy of the United States, most especially in the Housing Bubble that bust in 2008. His analysis states that Financial "bubbles" are an inevitable result of a systemic shift focused on the generation of value through the semiotic exchange and transfer of immaterial assets.[6] This economy is marked by several features: (1) a disassociation between the physical commodity and its representation in financial markets that is global in scope, (2) a reliance on fiat currency, (3) a financialization of the economy based on debt.

Part of this analysis is a discussion of the relationship between affective labor and what he has termed "agnotologic capitalism." Affective labor is the enabler for the creation of the bubbles that are characteristic of the digital capitalist economy. Where the reduction alienation of alienation is a precondition for the elimination of dissent. Affective labor is part of a larger activity where the population is distracted by affective pursuits and fantasies of economic advancement.

Automated Labor

Automation is a recurring theme in Betancourt's discussion of digital technology and capitalsm. In his discussion of the New Aesthetic, he argued that the transformations of production being created by computers and automated assembly lines belong to a larger shift in the digital capitalist economy:

The various artifacts brought together as the 'new aesthetic' are united by their orientation not towards human observation or functional utility, but rather by their invocation of productive values without human action -- the aura of the digital's separation of product from all that is required to produce it: labor, capital, resources. This transition point marks a shift from the fragmentation of the assembly-line where tasks are organized around the repetitive action of masses of human labor (itself an organization that implies semiotic disassembly and standardization) to an automated fabrication where the design is generated on digital machines and then implemented by other digital machines without human labor in the facture process; the necessity of human-as-designer thus comes into question as it is the only aspect of non-machine agency remaining, an element whose necessity is challenged by evolutionary algorithms and automated design.[7]

The replacement of human labor by automation poses a problem for capitalism according to Betancourt, because capitalism is dependent on the exchange of labor for wages that are then spend purchasing the production of that labor. With the elimination of labor by computer automation in what Betancourt has termed the law of automation:

Anything that can be automated, will be.[8]

Following the automation of physical production, the transformation of formerly intellectual labor by "autonomous production that began as a 'labor-saving' procedure now saves all human labor in/as the productive machine: it is this specific dimension of automated (immaterial) labor using digital technology that reflects an ideology of production-without-consumption."[9] The elimination of labor by automated labor presents a paradox for Betancourt's digital capitalism because the wages paid to workers for their labor is the basic element around which all of capitalism is built.

As Artist

Betancourt is a video maker whose movies are usually abstract and belong to the tradition of visual music. He has claimed these videos are related to his work as a theorist. He has been exhibiting his work since 1992 when Archaeomodern screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, since then he has produced many videos that have screened on television, in festivals, galleries and museums.

He has described his video Telemetry as a "documentary whose subject is those things that fall outside our direct perception. It adopts an abstract form precisely because what is represented has no direct physical form...instead our electronic intermediaries, satellite and deep space probes, send back numerical data we interpret intellectually to understand what it is like in those places we cannot go, what those things we cannot see look like." This concern with the relationship of scientific and speculative interpretations of space appears throughout his work.[10]

The Experimental TV Center's Video History Project has a biography.[11]

Notable Works

Videos

Free Art Project

In 1999, Betancourt created a "project" that invited artists to release their art using a license modeled after software licenses. This project was a forerunner to the Creative Commons public licenses.

Aesthetic Hazard Project

Betancourt's Aesthetic Hazard is a public installation project that imitates the more common barrier tapes marked "Caution" or "Police Line - Do Not Cross," but instead states: Aesthetic Hazard--Do Not Look. He has installed this project in a variety of locations in Miami and Chicago. website[12][13]

Publications

Bibliography

Books

Essays

Exhibition Catalogs

See also

External links

Academic Commentary on Work

Notes

  1. ↑ “Mary Hallock–Greenewalt’s Abstract Films,” Millennium Film Journal, no. 45/46 “Hybrids,” Fall 2006; illustrations provided by a Drake University Center for the Humanities Grant, 2005
  2. ↑ Zoï Kapoula and Louis-José Lestocart, Space and motion perception evoked by the painting “Study of a dog” of Francis Bacon, intellectica 2006/2, n° 44: Systèmes d’aide: Enjeux pour les technologies cognitives, pp. 215-226
  3. ↑ The article is in Spanish, but the abstract (quoted here) is also in English. José Manuel García Perera, "El movimiento como simulacro en el mundo virtual: Michael Betancourt y el arte de la inmediatez" Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie VII - Historia del Arte no. 4, 2016, pp. 143-158.
  4. ↑ Michael Betancourt, The Aura of the Digital, CTheory, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=519
  5. ↑ Michael Betancourt, The State of Information, CTheory, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=611
  6. ↑ "Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism", CTheory, Theory Beyond the Codes: tbc002, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=652
  7. ↑ "Automated Labor: The 'New Aesthetic' and Immaterial Physicality", CTheory, Theory Beyond the Codes: tbc048, http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=717
  8. ↑ "Automated Labor: The 'New Aesthetic' and Immaterial Physicality", CTheory, Theory Beyond the Codes: tbc048, http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=717
  9. ↑ "Automated Labor: The 'New Aesthetic' and Immaterial Physicality", CTheory, Theory Beyond the Codes: tbc048, http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=717
  10. ↑ He discusses these concerns in his article on his use of the Moon, “The Semiotics of the Moon as Fantasy and Destination,” Leonardo, vol. 48, no. 5, pp. 408 – 418; 435, 2015.
  11. ↑ Michael Betancourt's work can be found in the Experimental Television Center's Repository in the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell University Library
  12. ↑ ArtThrob #69
  13. ↑ Aesthetic Hazard—Do Not Look: A Must See, Elizabeth Hall, Miami Art Exchange
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