CONTENTS

 
   about
   MICHAEL BETANCOURT NEWS
   movies: AESTHETICS
   movies: NEWS & REVIEWS
   movies: SHOWS & SCREENINGS
   random art notes
   random how-tos
   research: AVANT-GARDE MOVIES
   research: MOTION GRAPHICS
   research: VISUAL MUSIC
   theory: CRITICAL OBSERVATIONS
   theory: DIGITAL CAPITALISM
   theory: GLITCH & POSTDIGITAL
   theory: working notes

 

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Glitch Theory: Art and Semiotics by Michael Betancourt
Movies by Michael Betancourt

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 Art of Light Organization
 Going Somewhere
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SEARCH ARCHIVES

archives begin in 1996

  

Now Available - Kritik des digitalen Kapitalismus

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 20, 2018 | permalink | TwitThis Digg Facebook StumbleUpon  |  Print



theory: DIGITAL CAPITALISM

Jetzt im Verkauf: 29.95 bestellen Sie Ihre Kopie direkt beim Verlag

Aus dem Engl. von Manfred Weltecke
270 S. einschl.

Die grten, erfolgreichsten und mchtigsten Unternehmen unserer Zeit sind lngst nicht mehr nur im klassischen produzierenden Gewerbe zu finden. Der atemberaubende Erfolg von Firmen wie Facebook oder Google beruht auf der Bereitstellung immaterieller Dienstleitungen, insbesondere aber auf der Sammlung von Daten.

Mit seiner Kritik des digitalen Kapitalismus legt Michael Betancourt eine scharfe Analyse dieser neuen konomischen Verhltnisse vor und beleuchtet deren Eigenschaften und Probleme. Von der vermeintlichen Demokratisierung der Gesellschaft durch die freie Verfgbarkeit von Informationen ber die Illusion der kostenfreien, weil nicht physischen Herstellung digitaler Produkte bis zur Neudefinition des Verhltnisses materieller und immaterieller Gter: Betancourt setzt sich mit den Begleiterscheinungen der digitalen Wirtschaft auseinander, die schon lngst unser Leben bestimmen und prgen.






 
A Paratext: The Going Somewhere Game

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 6, 2018 | permalink | TwitThis Digg Facebook StumbleUpon  |  Print



movies: NEWS & REVIEWS

Going Somewhere: The Role Playing Game is a table top role playing game adapted from movie maker Michael Betancourt's avant-garde serial. Containing all the rules needed to play, this rule book is designed to provide hours of fun. Designed to simplify the complexity of RPGs to speed game play, these rules can be used for either SCI-FI or Fantasy campaigns.

Download it for Free or Buy a book from Amazon.com




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WBG interviews me about Bitcoin & Digital Capitalism

story © Michael Betancourt | published February 17, 2018 | permalink | TwitThis Digg Facebook StumbleUpon  |  Print



theory: DIGITAL CAPITALISM

WBG has an interview about my work in The Critique of Digital Capitalism titled Gerechtigkeit in Zeiten der Digitalisierung available on their website in German:

1. Haben Kryptowhrungen wie Bitcoin nach Ihrer Meinung auf lngere Sicht eine Zukunft?
Die sich in Bitcoin und anderen Kryptowhrungen darstellende Technologie wird vielleicht neben ihrer Funktion, eine virtuelle Ware zu sein in der internationalen Bankindustrie zur Anwendung kommen. Es gibt einige Experimente in diese Richtung, aber fr die allgemeine ffentlichkeit erwarte ich, dass es zu einem Zusammenbruch kommen wird, sobald alle Bitcoins geschrft sind. Das Verstndnis dieser Entwicklung hngt von mehreren Eigenschaften der Technologie selbst ab: dass das Schrfen von Bitcoins ein Nebenprodukt der Berechnungen ist, die fr einzelne Transaktionen erforderlich sind, ist weithin bekannt. . . .

Here are my answers in English:




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Modernism = "Cinema"

story © Michael Betancourt | published February 12, 2018 | permalink | TwitThis Digg Facebook StumbleUpon  |  Print



theory: GLITCH & POSTDIGITAL

Cinema has always been linked to Modernist aesthetics: the definitions of commercial film, the avant-garde film, and video art as autonomous, independent and entirely separate from each other argues against their contextual influences and the hybrid crossings between them. The historical organization of cinema as a serious art form in the 1960s and 1970s linked the earlier selections of great films to an explicitly Modernist conception of motion pictures as an essentially realist, narrative form whose connections to the American art critic Clement Greenbergs teleological purity was revealed by the parallel articulation of the structural film in the avant-garde cinema by P. Adams Sitney. This Modernist heritage shapes the debates over postcinema, a reflected in the great films re-used as foundational axioms. This conception of cinema makes the contemporary challenge by digital technology emergent in postcinema inevitable as this model requires a denial of the convergences created by computer technology.




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Harmonia: Glitch, Movies and Visual Music - Now Available!

story © Michael Betancourt | published January 9, 2018 | permalink | TwitThis Digg Facebook StumbleUpon  |  Print



MICHAEL BETANCOURT NEWS

Harmonia, harmonies, analyzes the connections between glitch art, visual music, abstraction, and motion pictures. This collection is a chronological survey of glitch art pioneer Michael Betancourts artistic research into, around, and with digital motion pictures that theorizes and critiques visual music. This anthology is directly connected to his critical engagement with the socio-cultural meaning of visionary art that builds on the work of Umberto Eco and Michel Foucault to engage with the historical films of John Whitney, Mary Ellen Bute, Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, and Stan Brakhage (among others) connecting them with contemporary glitch movies. Included in this collection is his taxonomy of abstract forms based on synaesthesia, a discussion of the historical foundations and connections between color music/color organs, synaesthesia and the visual music instruments and films of the twentieth century, and an analysis of the fundamental connections between visual music and realism that reveals an ideological reification created by the synchronization of sound and image. This analysis goes beyond a historical recounting of artists and their works to propose an understanding of synaesthetic media in aesthetic as well as critical, ideological terms. Included are the essays The Aura of the Digital, The Invention of Glitch Video, Semiotics of the Moon as Fantasy and Destination, and Welcome to Cyberia along with many other talks, publications, and analyses of glitch art and visual music.

Harmonia: Glitch, Movies and Visual Music is an anthology of my writing on glitch and visual music. It's available in hardcover and paperback, 240 pages.