Abstract Photographs

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.

story © Michael Betancourt | published December 26, 2015 | permalink |  |  

The issue is basic survival and continued possibilities for carrying on with what one does. Marginal is thus about displaced actions that continue with neither recognition nor official sanction.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published December 17, 2015 | permalink |  |  

“Glitch” may be best known from its role in electonic music and digital composition, but it is equally—and more commonly—a part of the everyday visual engagement with computers. The technical aspects of digital technology—pixellated images that re/compose reality as a juxtaposition of discrete fragments—suggests a translation of visual space into a virtuality, cyberspace, that instead of being continuous is instead shot through with errors and failures of various types. Transfers between this digital technology and art have been a continuous part of its history, but the prominence of digtial imagery and digitally-derived forms has become an insistent part of contemporary media since the opoular embrace of the Internet in the mid-1990s. These visual forms of glitch, unlike its musical counterparts, have consistently been grouped with a variety of other terms, prominent among these are post-digital, post-internet and the new aesthetic; in academic contexts visual glitch will often simply identified with new media art, or occasionally video art.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published December 15, 2015 | permalink |  |  

Compression glitches have become the most common type of glitch encountered, not only in art, but in our everyday uses of technology. These technical failures are usually transitory, a momentary breach in the continuous datastream; we notice that they happen as quickly as we forget they were there: once they have passed, they vanish not only from the screen but from memory.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published December 7, 2015 | permalink |  |  

Going Somewhere: Episode IV reconfigures science fiction movies with documentary/scientific NASA/JPL documentation and abstract glitch footage to reveal an underlying fantasy of transcendence. The story follows a simple trajectory: a traveler arrives, then embarks on a more abstract journey into inner space—a transcendent metaphor for exploring the self.

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