I have been working with glitch techniques since the 1990s, first with analogue photography, then with digital imagery: Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics [link] Routledge, 2016 ISBN: 978-1138219540 Harmonia: Glitch, Movies and Visual Music Wildside Press, 2017 ISBN: 978-1479436095 "Critical Glitches and Glitch Art," Hz Journal, no. 19, July 2014 [link] "The Invention of Glitch Video: Digital TV Dinner (1978)"  [full text .pdf] Millennium Film Journal, no. 65, (Spring 2017) pp. 54-63 Lardani's Signature: Technical Mastery and Apparent Glitch in Lardani's titles for Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly   [link] or [.pdf] Bright Lights Film Journal no. 81, August-September, 2013 An Easy 7-Step Protocol for Databending   [link] or  [.pdf] Signal Culture Cookbook, ed. Tammy McGovern, 2014 ISBN: 978-0-9914917-0-4

More articles and translations are posted on MichaelBetancourt.com

GLIT©H ::: VERLUSTKONTROLLE [Control of Loss]

story © Michael Betancourt | published November 21, 2023 | permalink |  |  

Digitalvilla on Hedy-Lamarr-Platz & on ZooM
Part of the ZeM Annual Focus 2023/24 "Control of Loss"
Press Interview & Book Presentation: Monday 4th December, 3 p.m.

Registration required: kontakt@verena-voigt-pr.de

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story © Michael Betancourt | published April 18, 2023 | permalink |  |  

In order to distinguish the generative visual products of AI systems from other types of imagery such as photographs, I have decided to create a neologism, the "AImage," to identify these works and distinguish them from other types of images. This rhetorical gesture distinguishes these statistical products from other machine made images such as CGI or photography, while providing a readily apparent label that has the same immediacy as "photo."

story © Michael Betancourt | published October 12, 2021 | permalink |  |  

Now available for Pre-Order from amazon.com! The Instaglitch Project presents a selection of 52 full color images from Michael Betancourt's "Instaglitch Project" that exploited the aberrant and unheimlich results of image handling and processing by the Instagram photosharing app-it derived novel examples of Glitch Art from the faults inherent to the iPhone system. This project uses these inconsistencies as a mechanism for aesthetic creation that provides evidence for the fantasy of control that the "walled garden" of apps create. The development of the Instaglitch offers a counter to this hegemonic ideology via a studio practice that exploits the Instagram app's very limited 'degrees of freedom' without altering the app itself or employing less restrictive software. These works are examples of how repeated processing and 'filtering' of the same image within the same system-a feedback loop-magnifies the instabilities inherent in its operations. The 2,600 works in this series of static images demonstrates programmatic failures that are masked by its normal use, but are systemic instabilities-their identification allowed me to generate works by manipulating their impacts on a blank (white) image.

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 15, 2021 | permalink |  |  

Here are several experiments with generating glitches using software that isn't normally engaged for glitching, Adobe Illustrator:

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story © Michael Betancourt | published August 3, 2020 | permalink |  |  

The Decadent Review has a short essay I wrote on abstract photography.

Abstract photographs undo any certainty about reality; there is nothing to return to, nothing to unmask. The abstract photograph is itself, not a depiction resembling something in the world. Those contents its audience might think they recognize becomes the same uncertain visualization that metamorphic images and optical illusions pose: while there is clearly an image, what it shows is open to discussion, moving within boundaries fixed in such a way that the images seen are not the image shown . . .