No Ends Group Show at No Romance March 31, 2012

story © Michael Betancourt | March 23, 2012 | permalink |   

The collaborative video Viral Underground that Rey Parla and I made will be in this show:

On Saturday, March 31st, Osiel Rojas proudly presents “No Ends” a one night only group show at No Romance. The beautifully dark exhibition features a dozen artists with works varying in media, subject matter. These artists are of varying backgrounds, locations, and points of view, but all share a very basic need to make ends meet has served as a jumping off point for each piece featured in the show. While some pieces directly capture the disparity, violence, and angst of these overloaded abstract times others capture hybrid parallel emotions that may to a degree expose the artists’ process and intentions for a few hours. The ambiguity of this coming together is as fleeting as any New York City night, and less about a cohesive theme, and more about seizing the now.

“No Ends” demonstrates that in difficult times the possibilities of making and producing are the source of the artists’ inspirations, visions, and sustainability, as chaos seems to command the future and the present.

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story © Michael Betancourt | March 18, 2012 | permalink |   

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story © Michael Betancourt | March 5, 2012 | permalink |   

My movie, One, will also be in this festival, a Basement Films and UNM Cinematic Arts Department Production: info here.

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story © Michael Betancourt | March 3, 2012 | permalink |   

Two of my movies, Disks of Newton and One, will be in this festival. The Experimental Program will be on March 28 at 7:45.

The program includes:

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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 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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