Viral Underground

story © Michael Betancourt | December 10, 2011 | permalink |   

2.5 min
Designed by Rey Parla and Michael Betancourt

This movie was produced as a collaboration between the scratch film maker Rey Parla and digital movie maker Michael Betancourt. It developed from several years of discussions about collaborating on a project, and finally began when Parla sent a drive with material to Betancourt in the summer of 2011, which he then combined with some of his own material. The finished movie is a dialogue between their approaches and techniques, combining scratch, glitch, analog processing and digital compositing to create a hybrid.

story © Michael Betancourt | November 22, 2011 | permalink |   

The fall quarter is now over. I plan to post more history material and some additional thoughts about digital capitalism over the next few weeks, following Thanksgiving and Art Basel Miami Beach. I have some interesting research that needs some polishing before being posted.....

story © Michael Betancourt | November 7, 2011 | permalink |   

I have a sticker in this show curated by Paul Weston and DB Burkeman for Art Basel Miami Beach this year. They selected 75 artists from around the globe to create an intimate, (same size), black and white sticker.

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story © Michael Betancourt | November 1, 2011 | permalink |   

Saturday, November 19: Avant To Live!

Robbie Land + Michael Betancourt + Sylvia Schedelbauer +
Christopher Childs + Anna Spence + Takuro Masuda

Saturday November 19th 8pm at Beep Beep Gallery

I am planning to be at this show. The description is exciting: Camera-less works, glitch animation, 16mm film lit by fireflies, static datamoshing, archival collage, excel animation, and hand-painted films made by leading fine-art filmmakers working within the region and the globe.

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story © Michael Betancourt | November 1, 2011 | permalink |   

This movie is a diptych (2 panel) piece that I just finished. It was made using glitches as the basic source material. It's in HD, but this sample combines the two separate elements into a single movie.

story © Michael Betancourt | October 28, 2011 | permalink |   

The idea that the government is an unmitigated evil has its origins in American society with the concept of the “state of nature.” Proposed by Henry David Thoreau, the ideological claims of this view of human nature reveal themselves as an idealized, pastoral—one where society is responsible for everything that is wrong with culture, where individuals are seen as self-contained, self-sufficient and fully autonomous, corrupted only when they need to work together. It is a fantasy of independence, one where the very real social and cultural supports that make the “cabin in the woods” possible are systematically denied. To see the sociopathic tendencies of this ideology fully realized, one needs look no farther than Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

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story © Michael Betancourt | October 23, 2011 | permalink |   

The creation of “social networks” challenges traditional conceptions of intellectual property and this change makes clear how the rights assigned to the ownership of information come into question with the development of digital technology. That social networks violate privacy and survive through using their member’s information to sell ads is nothing new; the creation of free services enabling anyone with access to them to become an ‘author’ signals a move away from the productive action of humans and towards the automated surveillance of data collection, collation and retrieval, and this transformation reflects a fundamental shift in our conception of both identity and authorship—with implications for the idea of intellectual property as well.

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story © Michael Betancourt | October 20, 2011 | permalink |   

Max Keiser interviews me in the second half of the show, and we discuss the current #OWS movement and the role of agnotology in causing the current crisis and protest.

Go see Episode 199:

This week Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, talk about the European penny drops as more banks need more bailouts while the public debt clock ticks up to $40 trillion. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser interviews Michael Betancourt about the threat that Occupy Wall Street presents to our modern form of capitalism that relies on ignorance and passivity in the population in order to operate schemes of fraud and bubbles.

story © Michael Betancourt | October 20, 2011 | permalink |   

The current crisis continues not because those protesting the status quo are lazy, unwilling to work or demanding a government handout; it continues because of a fundamental problem with consumption-based capitalism that has accelerated under digital capitalism: the need for continuous growth. Immaterial production was posed as the solution to this failure when it emerged as a potentially dominant mode of production in the 1980s. The contemporary dominance of immaterialism—where the physical constraints presented by scarcity are systematically ignored and left out of consideration—depends on agnotology to confuse, deceive and obliviate certainty; with this elimination of the most basic grounds for conclusions and evaluations, the potential for dissent is greatly reduced and the effectiveness of dissent when it does appear is curtailed.

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story © Michael Betancourt | October 19, 2011 | permalink |   

The third issue of avant-garde media magazine Incite has some of its contents posted and is using KickStarter as a way to help raise the money needed to publish this year.

Lots of good stuff in this one, worth taking a look; I have something in this issue, so I am biased.