Notes on Marginality

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

The “rationalization” of industrial processes known as “Taylorism,” appears as the fragmentation of production on the assembly line. This theory initially functions to enable mass production, but finds continued application in the algorythmic translation of agency into digital automation. This approach to how factories organized their processes, codified by engineer and theorist Frederick W. Taylor as “scientific management,” enables the particular type of mass production that defined American industry in the first half of the twentieth century. Links between Modernist art theory and industrial protocols inform the development of the digital. The transformation of machine labor from an extension of human action—as the mechanical amplification of human labor—into the digital, where the machine does not augment but supplant.

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