Bøger af Michael Betancourt

What do glitches reveal about the normally invisible processes behind our interpretations? Glitches and Glitch Art illuminate the unseen assumptions, ideology of dialectical thinking, and role of established knowledge that shapes as well as determines our engagement with the world. Betancourt builds on the role of perception in guiding these interpretations to explore the possibilities offered by glitches for addressing digital media. Not confined to esoteric questions of semiosis, this study presents an expansive model of ambivalence and ambiguity whose ramifications address how initial assumptions and beliefs create meaning.Tracking glitches across technical media old and new, and moving from early abstraction's attempts to visualize a transcendental spiritualism through to contemporary AI generated art and media, Betancourt describes how glitches are not just technical failures but products of the instabilities between human interpretations and autonomous machinic operations that create a 'discursive aesthetic' guided by cultural fantasies of digital media's immateriality that idealize it as a perfect, transcendent form. A journey to the roots of meaning itself, Betancourt offers a paradigm that unpacks how engaging the glitch can become a critical model not only for artists, critics, and academics, but for anyone interested in Contemporary Art, tactical media, and cultural activism. all illustrations in full color

Anything that can be automated, will be. The "magic" that digital technology has brought us - self-driving cars, Bitcoin, high frequency trading, the internet of things, social networking, mass surveillance, the 2009 housing bubble - has not been considered from an ideological perspective. The Critique of Digital Capitalism identifies how digital technology has captured contemporary society in a reification of capitalist priorities, and also describes digital capitalism as an ideologically "invisible" framework that is realized in technology. Written as a series of articles between 2003 and 2015, the book provides a broad critical scope for understanding the inherent demands of capitalist protocols for expansion without constraint (regardless of social, legal or ethical limits) that are increasingly being realized as autonomous systems that are no longer dependent on human labor or oversight and implemented without social discussion of their impacts. The digital illusion of infinite resources, infinite production, and no costs appears as an "end to scarcity," whereby digital production supposedly eliminates costs and makes everything equally available to everyone. This fantasy of production without consumption hides the physical costs and real-world impacts of these technologies.The critique introduced in this book develops from basic questions about how digital technologies directly change the structure of society: why is "Digital Rights Management" not only the dominant "solution" for distributing digital information, but also the only option being considered? During the burst of the "Housing Bubble" burst 2009, why were the immaterial commodities being traded of primary concern, but the actual physical assets and the impacts on the people living in them generally ignored? How do surveillance (pervasive monitoring) and agnotology (culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data) coincide as mutually reinforcing technologies of control and restraint? If technology makes the assumptions of its society manifest as instrumentality - then what ideology is being realized in the form of the digital computer? This final question animates the critical framework this analysis proposes.Digital capitalism is a dramatically new configuration of the historical dynamics of production, labor and consumption that results in a new variant of historical capitalism. This contemporary, globalized network of production and distribution depends on digital capitalism's refusal of established social restraints: existing laws are an impediment to the transcendent aspects of digital technology. Its utopian claims mask its authoritarian result: the superficial "objectivity" of computer systems are supposed to replace established protections with machinic function - the uniform imposition of whatever ideology informs the design. However, machines are never impartial: they reify the ideologies they are built to enact. The critical analysis of capitalist ideologies as they become digital is essential to challenging this process. Contesting their domination depends on theoretical analysis. This critique challenges received ideas about the relationship between labor, commodity production and value, in the process demonstrating how the historical Marxist analysis depends on assumptions that are no longer valid. This book therefore provides a unique, critical toolset for the analysis of digital capitalist hegemonics.

Art, AI and Culture interrogates the aesthetic heritage of Modernism as it informs contemporary cultural applications of AI which demonstrate there is no escape from the kaleidoscopic lineage of colonialism where the status of "human" and all the rights that entails were withheld from the colonized in general, and from slaves, labor, and women specifically. This analysis theorizes the social identity threat posed by AI's challenges to existing social, cultural, political, and economic orders. Digital technology is not exempt from this historical lineage that transforms familiar questions of economic displacement caused by machine learning and digital automation into new battles in an on-going conflict over social status and position. This cultural approach to AI reveals the ways that it transforms expressions of identity, leisure and luxury into opportunities for profit extraction. Social phenomena, (including racism, sexism, and nationalism), capture individuals in a web of systemic control where digital automation provides a mechanism preserving the existing hierarchies and social status that it might otherwise challenge. Drawing on a reconception of capitalism as a proxy for social status and position, this study critiques of the fantasy that replacing all human labor will create a fully automated luxury utopia without bias, oppression, or social change.With full color images.

Expand your knowledge of the aesthetics, forms and meaning of motion graphics as well as the long-running connections between the American avant-garde film, video art and TV commercials. In 1960 avant-garde animator and inventor John Whitney started a company called "Motion Graphics, Inc." to make animated titles and logos. His new company crystalized a relationship between avant-garde film and commercial broadcast design/film titles. Careful discussion of historical works puts them in context, allowing their reappearance in contemporary motion graphics clear. This book includes a thorough examination of the history of title design from the earliest films through the present, including Walter Anthony, Saul Bass, Maurice Binder, Pablo Ferro, Wayne Fitzgerald, Nina Saxon, and Kyle Cooper. This book also covers early abstract film (the Futurists Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna, Leopold Survage, Walther Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, Mary Ellen Bute, Len Lye and Norman McLaren) and puts the work of visual music pioneers Mary Hallock-Greenewalt and Thomas Wilfred in context. The History of Motion Graphics is the essential textbook and general reference for understanding how and where the field of motion graphic design came from and where it's going.

This portfolio of works produced between 1990 and 2021 is the companion to the book Research Art by Michael Betancourt. It is a full color chronological documentation of movies, statics and social installations. This concise summary reveals a diverse practice addressing how media history, digital technology, and capitalist ideology inform studio practice. At once very specific, the work collected here reveals a consistent and coherent aesthetic realized by an artist who self-consciously placed himself on the margin of the art world as a way to achieve critical distance. Showing both representative stills and documentary information, this Portfolio reveals the constant concerns with critical praxis that unify Betancourt's various projects.

52 full color images from Michael Betancourt's "Instaglitch Project" that exploited the aberrant and unheimlich results of image handling and processing by the Instagram photosharing app.

A NEW KINETIC ART: This book presents a new approach to the conceptual basis of all visual art, and while it is about making movies -- the catch-all for video, film, computer graphics and anything else that may appear to move -- the thrust of this book is a radical redefinition of all visual media, including traditional standards like painting. The framework these notes propose is a way of thinking about visual art that eliminates all former media in favor of a division based on our ability to see movement or change in a work of art. While most movies change and move rapidly, this understanding is equally concerned with the very slow, or apparently immobile. (Revised and Expanded Second Edition.)

Visual Music Instrument Patents Volume One is a collection of primary source documents for visual music instruments, often called "color organs," gleaned from the United States Patent Office. Information about these devices is often only available through the inventor's patent applications, but these applications are not currently available except through the time-consuming process of searching Patent Office databases. This volume is an informational resource for those instruments that are already known and studied (Bishop, Rimington, Wilfred, Fischinger), and includes a number of patents for other instruments that have not been examined as thoroughly (Munsell, Hallock-Greenwalt, others). Volume One also includes a few patents that are related to visual music instruments such as systems of notation for writing visual music and devices for determining "color harmony" through a relationship to musical form.

Artemis A Tragedy of Collage is a fantasy of mythological proportions where the story we see is the fantasy of the title character whose journey causes her to lose sight of reality. Filled with fantastical beasts and evocative imagery, Michael Betancourt's second collage novel is both epic in scale and powerful in impact.

A book of theory and critical writing on art in Miami, Florida, including Charles Recher, Roxy Paine, Jens Diercks, Frederico Uribe, Normal Leibman, Salvador Dali, Guy Richards Smit, Diego Machado, and many more -- plus the city of Miami itself!

A collage novel following in tradition started by surreal artist Max Ernst. It follows the story of two sisters and a mysterious creature called The Nightengale, chronicling their journeys. A fun and fabulous exploration of myth and metaphor.

A NEW KINETIC ART: This book presents a new approach to the conceptual basis of all visual art, and while it is about making movies -- the catch-all for video, film, computer graphics and anything else that may appear to move -- the thrust of this book is a radical redefinition of all visual media, including traditional standards like painting. The framework these notes propose is a way of thinking about visual art that eliminates all former media in favor of a division based on our ability to see movement or change in a work of art. While most movies change and move rapidly, this understanding is equally concerned with the very slow, or apparently immobile.