Keiser Report, Episodes 894 & 895 on Digital Capitalism

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 31, 2016 | permalink |  |  

Max Keiser interviews me about my book The Critique of Digital Capitalism in the Keiser Report, Episodes 894 and 895:

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story © Michael Betancourt | published March 20, 2016 | permalink |  |  

My 25-year long project concerned with windowing and collage/spatial montage is now available on amazon.com. Beyond Spatial Montage: Windowing, or the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space offers an extended discussion of the morphology and structure of compositing, graphic juxtapositions, and montage employed in motion pictures. Drawing from the history of avant-garde and commercial cinema, as well as studio-based research, this study critiques both cinematic realism and Manovich's proposal of "spatial montage." This new taxonomic framework for conceptualizing linkages between media art and narrative cinema opens new areas of experimentation for today’s film editors, motion designers, and other media artists.

You can read a preview here.

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 13, 2016 | permalink |  |  

I have some movies showing in upcoming festivals:

Crossroads program 1 Friday, April 1 at 7pm

Crossroads program 3 Saturday, April 2 at 1pm

Experiments in Cinema 11.4 April 5–10, 2016

story © Michael Betancourt | published January 11, 2016 | permalink |  |  

My book is now out from Punctum Books, and available on amazon.com. Running 265 pages, this volume collects and expands my critical theory essays pubished over the past decade:

Introduction
​1​ The Ideology of Automation
​2 ​The Emergence of Immaterial Physicality
​3​ The Aura of the Digital
​4​ The Immaterial Commodity
​5​ The Valorization of the Author
​6​ The ‘Black Box’ of Past Experience
​7​ The State of Information
​8​ The Demands of Agnotology::Surveillance
​9 ​The Scarcity of Capital
​10​ On Immaterialism

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.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published December 27, 2015 | permalink |  |  

I made a series of fully abstract darkroom images between 1989 and 1994 that are available in a book from Amazon.com.

They represent an aggressively edited sample of what began as a darkroom experiment with solarization that expanded, to include photograms, but ultimately eliminated physical objects entirely to create complex visual imagery from chemical flows and pure light. The abstract images this process created are unique, produced without the intervention of camera or negative.