Michael Betancourt (born 1971) is a critical theorist, art and film historian, and animator. His principle published works focus on the technologies of visual music, new media art and theory, and formalist study of motion pictures.
Betancourt's father is archaeologist Philip P. Betancourt, and his brother is author John Gregory Betancourt. He spent his summers in Crete, Greece, working as a photographer on his father's excavation at Pseira. His first film exhibition was Archaeomodern, shown in the Ann Arbor Festival of Experimental Film in 1993. In 1995, his film a self-referential film in 30 sentences won a Director's Citation award at the Black Maria Film Festival.
Betancourt was born in New Jersey in 1971. He attended Temple University in Philadelphia, PA to study motion pictures, and then received an MA in Film Studies at the University of Miami in Miami, FL studying under film historian William Rothman. He also received his Ph.D. from the University of Miami in Interdisciplinary Studies, focusing on Art History, Communications/Film Studies and History.
In addition to scholarly work, he has written popular articles and reviews on art, art theory and culture for the Miami Art Exchange [1] and Art Scene magazines.
Betancourt has discovered that the inventor Mary Hallock-Greenewalt produced the earliest hand-painted films known to still exist. However, these were not movies but films produced specifically to be performed by her earliest version of the Sarabet which was a machine for automatic accompaniment to records. This device was an early music visualizer of the type now included with computer audio-players. Even though these films were not designed to be motion pictures, they were produced with templates and aerosol sprays, producing repeating geometric patterns in the same way as the hand painted films of Len Lye from the 1930s.
He has also published a short monograph, combined with a large collection of short essays, pictures and other archival material about the visual music group Lumonics that was organized and run by Mel and Dorothy Tanner in South Florida.
Most of his other visual music-related scholarship takes the form of anthologies of technology patents, or reprints of earlier texts on visual music machines designed for live performance.
Using psychological studies of motion perception, Betancourt has argued [2] that the motion seen in motion pictures is identical to the motion seen in paintings. He terms this second type painterly motion and argues that both kinds are invented by the subjective viewer: "Unlike motion in the real world that is physically eminent, the motion we see in movies and through the technique of painterly motion is entirely a result of a human perception. The motion we see does not exist outside our perception." Work by painters Francis Bacon and Peter Paul Rubens present the type of motion effect identified by Betancourt as being psychologically the same as real motion of actual objects in the world.
Betancourt's construction of formalism suggests a broader scope for applications of film theory than simply motion pictures since it focuses on both painting and experimental film. This approach was developed in his book, Structuring Time: notes on making movies. He approaches the motion picture as a series of distinct, but related domains of aesthetic manipulation: camera, image, editing, projection, screen, and sound.
In a series of articles starting with "The Aura of the Digital," Betancourt has criticized what he called the “immaterialism” of digital technology, specifically the claims that digital technology ends scarcity through being able to create value without expenditure, unlike the reality of limited resources, time, expense. It is based on denying the actual costs of access, creation, production, and maintenance of computer networks and technologies. He sees the “aura of the digital” as both the capitalist fantasy of continuous expansion made possible by digital technology and as the anti-capitalism fantasy of a world without scarcity or need for capitalist production.
The Aura of Information
Betancourt’s concept of the “aura of information” is the separation made possible by digital technology of the information and the ways that information is carried by technology. This idea claims the digital transcends physical form by separating meaning from the physical objects that present the meaningful information to its audience. It is the tendency to ignore the particular physical details of how we encounter information, in favor of just paying attention to the information itself.
Digital Capitalism
In "Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism," Betancourt proposed that the illusion of a rupture between physical and virtual production posed by the aura of the digital can be observed in the political economy of the United States, most especially in the Housing Bubble that bust in 2008. His analysis states that Financial "bubbles" are an inevitable result of a systemic shift focused on the generation of value through the semiotic exchange and transfer of immaterial assets. This economy is marked by several features: (1) a disassociation between the physical commodity and its representation in financial markets that is global in scope, (2) a reliance on fiat currency, (3) a financialization of the economy based on debt.
Part of this analysis is a discussion of the relationship between affective labor and what he has termed "agnotologic capitalism." Affective labor is the enabler for a the creation of the bubbles that are characteristic of the digital capitalist economy. Where the reduction alienation of alienation is a precondition for the elimination of dissent. Affective labor is part of a larger activity where the population is distracted by affective pursuits and fantasies of economic advancement.
Betancourt is a video maker whose movies are usually abstract and belong to the tradition of visual music. He has claimed these videos are related to his work as a theorist. [3] He has been exhibiting his work since 1992 when Archaeomodern screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, since then he has produced many videos that have screened on television, in festivals, galleries and museums.
He has described his video Telemetry as a "documentary whose subject is those things that fall outside our direct perception. It adopts an abstract form precisely because what is represented has no direct physical form...instead our electronic intermediaries, satellite and deep space probes, send back numerical data we interpret intellectually to understand what it is like in those places we cannot go, what those things we cannot see look like." [4]
The Experimental TV Center's Video History Project has a biography.
Notable Works
Videos
* Aurora, 2001 Microcinema International
* She, My Memory, 2002 review, IMDB
* Year, 2003 review
* Telemetry, 2005 review
* Casual wave, 2007 [5]
Free Art Project
In 1999, Betancourt created a "project" that invited artists to release their art using a license modeled after software licenses. This project was a forerunner to the Creative Commons public licenses. [6]
Aesthetic Hazard Project
Betancourt's Aesthetic Hazard is a public installation project that imitates the more common barrier tapes marked "Caution" or "Police Line - Do Not Cross," but instead states: Aesthetic Hazard--Do Not Look. He has installed this project in a variety of locations in Miami and Chicago. website
How to Write an AvantGarde Manifesto (A Manifesto), Lee Scrivner
Zoï Kapoula and Louis-José Lestocart, Space and motion perception evoked by the painting “Study of a dog” of Francis Bacon, intellectica 2006/2, n° 44: Systèmes d’aide: Enjeux pour les technologies cognitives, pp. 215—226
Summarizing Motion in Video Sequences, Kevin Forbes
Piotr Zawojski, "Cyberculture as the vanguard of our time," published in The age of avant-garde, ed. L. Bieszczad. Edited by L. Bieszczady Mountains, Krakow 2006.
Arthur Kroker, Simon Glezos and Michael Betancourt, The Future of Digital Capitalism, Digital Inflections, CTheory Global, Online Seminar on Critical Digital Studies, 2010.
