Article on my Glitch movies

story © Michael Betancourt | published July 16, 2016 | permalink |  |  

José Manuel García Perera, painting professor at Universidad de Sevilla, wrote an interesting article on my glitch work that was published earlier this year.

Abstract: In recent times, artistic creation has come closer to the media image proposed by Internet, thus seriously altering an aesthetic experience based before on movement of the viewer around the work and now defined by screens that induce passivity. Michael Betancourt’s video work, part of the so-called glitch art, which focuses on the failure that can occur within the digital realm, has been here the basis for a comparative study between different concepts of movement in art, as well as between a current and a past art, a comparison that allows us to see clearly how technological advances have produced radical changes in the physical, spatial and mobile nature of the artwork. Betancourt’s investigation proposes a new kinetic art that becomes critical through error, mimics the real-time movement that contemporary culture demands, and uncovers the artificiality of images that mimic reality as if they wanted to replace it.

The full article is available as a pdf online: "El movimiento como simulacro en el mundo virtual: Michael Betancourt y el arte de la inmediatez" published in Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie VII - Historia del Arte no. 4, 2016, pp. 143-158.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published May 20, 2016 | permalink |  |  

My new book Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics has been officially announced on the Routledge website! (152 pages | 35 B/W Illus.) Preorder on amazon.com.

Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Internet Art explores the concept of "glitch" alongside contemporary digital political economy to develop a general theory of critical media using glitch as a case study and model, focusing specifically on examples of digital art and aesthetics. While prior literature on glitch practice in visual arts has been divided between historical discussions and social-political analyses, this work provides a rigorous, contemporary theoretical foundation and framework.

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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 3, 2015 | permalink |  |  

The music video produced for Sa’eed Ali’s song of the same title, Helios | Divine is 4 minutes long, organized into four sections of approximately equal length. It is designed to act as a “posthuman landscape” where what we believe we see is not entirely the same as what is actually visible on screen: a complex network of squares and rectangles that ‘twinkle’ and contain a continually shifting field of colors that combine into larger blocks only to break into smaller, more discrete units. The imagery presented is emergent—what can be seen when looking at a still image is radically different than the encounter with the movie—but is also composed from uniform squares of color, an effect of the glitching process that stripped recognizable, high definition imagery from the “raw” footage. This visual development follows the sequence of imagery common to the revelatory experiences described in the 1930s by German psychologist Heinrich Klüver. A summary of his imagery describes the progression of Helios | Divine: in a continuously transforming shot (rather than a series of individual, discrete shots), the initial ‘parting of the veil,’ becomes by degrees a beautiful landscape, then a figure that merges into a large, circular disk with light rays stretching out, followed by a second, darker landscape.

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