17 Facts About Michael Betancourt

Michael Betancourt's principal published works focus on the critique of digital capitalism, motion graphics, visual music, new media art, theory, and formalist study of motion pictures.

Michael Betancourt enrolled at Temple University for film studies and received an MA in Film Studies at the University of Miami, studying under film historian William Rothman.

Michael Betancourt is both a historian and practitioner of visual music.

Michael Betancourt exhibited his videos at visual music showcases such as the iotaCenter and SoundImageSound.

Michael Betancourt created a system for designing abstract animations based on synesthesia that he uses in his animations.

Michael Betancourt discovered that the inventor Mary Hallock-Greenewalt produced the earliest hand-painted films known to exist; these were used with the earliest version of her Sarabet machine that automatically synchronized colored lights with records.

Michael Betancourt wrote a short monograph and a large collection of short essays, pictures, and other archival material about the visual music group Lumonics composed of Mel and Dorothy Tanner of South Florida.

Michael Betancourt has written about glitch art as both an artist and a critic and employs glitches in his videos.

Michael 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 use of glitch art to create critical media is a focus of Michael Betancourt's theoretical writing on glitch art.

Michael Betancourt pulls apart the narrative tropes of Sci-Fi at the same time that he pulls apart the pictures, pixel by pixel, creating a radically open form that resists the hypnotic myth-making of Hollywood.

Michael Betancourt 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 needs for capitalist production.

In "Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism," Michael 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 burst in 2008.

Michael Betancourt's movies are usually abstract and belong to the tradition of visual music.

Michael Betancourt has claimed these videos are related to his work as a theorist.

Michael Betancourt has exhibited 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 and in festivals, galleries, and museums.

Michael Betancourt installed this project in a variety of locations in Miami and Chicago.