Experiments in Cinema 8.53 Festival DVD

story © Michael Betancourt | May 16, 2013 | permalink |   

My movie Antag | Protag is included in the Experiments in Cinema 8.53 Festival DVD set. Every year the festival releaases a DVD with movies shown in their programs, allowing people who couldn't make it to see what was shown. I think this is a great idea and I wish more festivals would do something similar.

story © Michael Betancourt | May 13, 2013 | permalink |   

My movie Dancing Glitch, nominated for a Jury Prize, will be showing in the Montreal Underground Film Festival 8 "Caffinated Jitterbugs" program. The MUFF 8 website has the showtimes.

The festival runs from May 24 to 26.

story © Michael Betancourt | May 10, 2013 | permalink |   

Capitalism itself is reified in the idealized “free market” as the necessary (and natural) order of the world in the conception of ‘market competition’ as a variant of Darwinian natural selection (evolution); agnotology is the creation of uncertainty and ambivalent ‘fact’; it is a competitive tool incompatible with the idealized “free market” of capitalism.

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story © Michael Betancourt | April 27, 2013 | permalink |   

Signal Culture, a new not-for-profit media arts organization, is rapidly approaching the final week of fundraising.

If you haven’t already donated, please take a look:
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/signal-culture

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story © Michael Betancourt | March 9, 2013 | permalink |   

This year's Experiments in Cinema Festival will be showing my movie Antag|Protag (2012) in the first screening in this year's program:

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story © Michael Betancourt | February 7, 2013 | permalink |   

My book, The History of Motion Graphics: From Avant-Garde to Industry in the United States, is now available on amazon.com.

There is also a hard cover edition, appropriate for libraries....

story © Michael Betancourt | February 6, 2013 | permalink |   

My new article "Automated Labor: The ‘New Aesthetic’ and Immaterial Physicality" is now in print on CTheory.

This essay considers Karl Marx' short essay ‘The Fragment on Machines’ and its relationship to digital automation. The ‘new aesthetic’ described by James Bridle is a typical example of this new, automated labor beginning to impact the physical world and provides a reference point for the examination of ‘The Fragment on Machines’: Marx divided labor into three categories (means, material and living labor) that is in the process of being reorganized by digital automated systems (in both immaterial labor and physical production forms). This reorganization forces an underlying paradox in capitalism into focus, foregrounding the mismatch between a capitalist productive system and the consumer society required to maintain that system, a paradox that emerges precisely because exchange value emerges from the relationship between one commodity and another—from the exchange of a commodity for the acquisition of another: human labor is the underlying commodity required by this entire system, a commodity rendered obsolete by digital automation; the ‘new aesthetic’ provides physical examples of this transition-in-progress.

story © Michael Betancourt | January 20, 2013 | permalink |   

This is an excerpt from a new article I'm working on that is concerned with the use of glitches in art, and how that use related to a critically engaged media practice:

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story © Michael Betancourt | December 31, 2012 | permalink |   

My movie Antag|Protag will be screening in the Fixed Media Program on Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 7:30 PM as part of the SoundImageSound Festival.

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story © Michael Betancourt | December 29, 2012 | permalink |   

Here is a new movie that I've decided is finished, just in time for the new year.

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