EXPERIMENTS IN CINEMA 11.4 - Showtime for my movie

story © Michael Betancourt | published April 4, 2016 | permalink |  |  

You can see The Dogs of Space at the Experiments in Cinema 11.4 Festival, screening at the Guild Cinema in Program #1 on Tuesday, April 5 at 4pm.

Guild Cinema
3405 Central Ave NE
Albuquerque, NM
Tel: 505-255-1848

story © Michael Betancourt | published April 2, 2016 | permalink |  |  

By considering how machine labor as an extension of human action--as the mechanical amplification of human labor--becomes the digital, the machine does not augment but supplant. This removal of the “human intermediary” whose importance "Taylorism" (aka "scientific management," proposed in The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911) removes from production (assembly-line labor is instrumental, not intelligent) is part of a continuous trajectory from tasks organized around repetitive action (itself an organization that implies semiotic disassembly and standardization) into the automation of actions in digital automation where computers leave only a limited role for humans. Taylor’s approach elides the individual’s expertise in performing their work, replacing it with decisions made by management--in the process eliminating their agency. This transformation renders human labor an appendage to the production process, necessary but incidental to the activity being performed—actions that are prescribed and fully delimited in advance of the work being done. It transforms the labor into an unintelligent rendering of managerial agency as the thinking required in production is no longer the domain of labor. For Taylor’s analysis the human decision is the “problem” to be removed from the production process, just as human labor (in the form of wages) is the expense that must be minimized to maintain profitability.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published April 1, 2016 | permalink |  |  

You can see my movies at the Crossroads Festival at the San Francisco Cinematheque in Program #1: The Dark Rift screening Friday, April 1 at 7pm, and Program #3: The Dogs of Space screening Saturday, April 2 at 1pm.

San Francisco Cinematheque
2961 16th Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Tel: 415-863-7576

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.