Digital Graffiti 2022 - Best of Show - Alys Beach, FL

story © Michael Betancourt | published May 13, 2022 | permalink |  |  

I am honored to have my work chosen as Best of Show at Digital Graffiti 2022. This was a great show with so much wonderful work, I am really happy to have been a part of it!

The show was in Alys Beach, FL from May 13 to May 14.

DG2022 was curated by John Colette and included work by Adriana Moya, Alex Campbell, Andy McKeown, August Bach, Bettina Müller, Border Williams, Carlos Vargas, Chandler Williams, Chris Cameron and Christina Georgieva, David Bennett, Eddie Lohmeyer, Eric Homan, Fumie Matters, Irene Mamiye, Isabel Clavo, Jeremy Newman, Jonah Allen, Kate Balsley, Katie Rolph and lo Ermoli, Katina Bitsicas, Keaton Fox and Renee Silva, Linda Loh, Luke Hildreth, Maria Fernandez, Michael Burton, and Michael Betancourt. Along with pieces by the Artists in Residence: mammasONica Peter Clark and Cody Samson ‘Shmody.’

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 5, 2022 | permalink |  |  

A limited edition filio/book of my typoems, Thoughts Without Words is now available from the Candaian publisher nOIR:Z.

story © Michael Betancourt | published February 25, 2022 | permalink |  |  

I make “Glitch Art”; my work pioneered this engagement with digital computers in the 1990s before it even had a name. The role of autonomous and automated systems in my work makes the question of ‘my process’ something that can be difficult to articulate clearly. The way I understand these generative images as simply another category or type of footage, one that is abstracted, but is neither necessarily critical nor essentially ‘broken’ shapes how I use it as both a formal model to emulate with the non-glitched, and as an abstracting protocol to employ against the photographic realism that might otherwise emerge in my movies. Those ‘intentional’ factors constrain the glitched materials so they become cues for their audience that what they see is not merely a malfunction, but is consciously shaped and chosen. The glitch is a pervasive, even dominant, contemporary sensibility for all the ruptures, aberrations, transformations that technical processes create—becoming manifestations of our interactions with the world.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published January 13, 2022 | permalink |  |  

Michael Betancourt is a Glitch Art pioneer who began manipulating digital errors in 1990. This US$20.00 collection surveys his HD movies.

These movies have shown in film festivals, art fairs, and galleries internationally, influencing the use of glitches in popular culture (such as in the title sequence to Amazon's sci-fi program The Expanse).

You can get the collection here:
https://www.michaelbetancourt.com/available/michael-betancourt-blueray.html

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story © Michael Betancourt | published December 2, 2021 | permalink |  |  

If one rejects or questions that idea that cinema can function as a metaphor for interior experience through the abstraction of the image, what remains to consider? This idea of cinema-as-metaphor is deeply ingrained in the aesthetics of “avant-garde cinema” and is one of the reasons for its fetishing of celluloid in opposition to electronic video and digital technologies. This heritage of Stan Brakhage’s work continues to haunt this genre of production twenty years after his death, effectively holding the third major variety of cinematic production, the poetic, to a set of aesthetics and propositions that were never as restrictive when they were proposed as they have become now that celluloid is obsolete.