Immaterial Physicality and Marx

story © Michael Betancourt | published February 6, 2013 | permalink |  |  

My new article "Automated Labor: The ‘New Aesthetic’ and Immaterial Physicality" is now in print on CTheory.

This essay considers Karl Marx' short essay ‘The Fragment on Machines’ and its relationship to digital automation. The ‘new aesthetic’ described by James Bridle is a typical example of this new, automated labor beginning to impact the physical world and provides a reference point for the examination of ‘The Fragment on Machines’: Marx divided labor into three categories (means, material and living labor) that is in the process of being reorganized by digital automated systems (in both immaterial labor and physical production forms). This reorganization forces an underlying paradox in capitalism into focus, foregrounding the mismatch between a capitalist productive system and the consumer society required to maintain that system, a paradox that emerges precisely because exchange value emerges from the relationship between one commodity and another—from the exchange of a commodity for the acquisition of another: human labor is the underlying commodity required by this entire system, a commodity rendered obsolete by digital automation; the ‘new aesthetic’ provides physical examples of this transition-in-progress.

story © Michael Betancourt | published January 20, 2013 | permalink |  |  

This is an excerpt from a new article (slated for publication in Hz no 19) on the use of glitches in art, and how that use related to a critically engaged media practice:

The term “glitch art” is an attempt to distinguish between the specific use of glitches in an artwork as opposed to those happening spontaneously in non-art contexts/works: it is also a term that describes a particular media practice identified as being critically engaged. However, the distinction between an unpremeditated technical failure, unstable and transitory, and the use of audio-or-visual artifacts that coincide with these incidental errors, stable and repeatably a part of a finished work may be difficult to identify when encountered in a work since they can (and in artistic practice often are) indistinguishable; the ontological origins of any particular glitch are not necessary apparent in the form of the glitch itself. Various writers on ‘glitch art’ have proposed terms to identify this ontological distinction between a transitory technical failure (always called “glitch”) and other variants that are then given a different designation, but which may have the same form—“glitch-alike” (Morandi), “domesticated glitch” (Menkman). These distinctions are problematic in art, as theorist Curt Cloninger has observed: “The term ‘glitch art’ might apply to all domesticated glitches and all wild glitches that have been ‘captured’ and recontextualized as art.” The “might” opens the potential scope of ‘glitch art’ beyond simply those glitches “captured” in a recording to include “wild glitches” orchestrated to occur on demand within a specific performace. Digital technology itself, based in sampling, enables the apparently ‘perfect’ reproduction that is the hypothetical ‘norm’ which allows the identification of the glitch. What is produced by the immaterial processing of digital technology is an always perfect new example of the work in question, made specifically for the moment of encounter; it is an “original.” This human-readable form is a pure product of the digitized samples (data) transformed by the decoding protocol. ‘Glitch art’ is a reflection of how artists have engaged with this underlying structure by looking for, producing or exploiting the “errors” emergent in any complex system.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published December 31, 2012 | permalink |  |  

My movie Antag|Protag will be screening in the Fixed Media Program on Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 7:30 PM as part of the SoundImageSound Festival.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published December 29, 2012 | permalink |  |  

Here is a new movie that I've decided is finished, just in time for the new year.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published November 26, 2012 | permalink |  |  

MEMIC (Midlands Experimental Moving Image Collective)

One will be in the screening and Viral Underground will be one of the pieces in the video art exhibition at the Althorpe Street Studios & Gallery, Royal Leamington Spa. Leamington is just over an hour by train from London, and 30 mins from Birmingham:

Althorpe Industrial Estate, Althorpe Street, Leamington Spa, CV31 2AU