Michael Betancourt
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Michael Betancourt (b. 1971, New Jersey) 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.
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[edit] Scholarship
Michael Betancourt attended Temple University in Philadelphia, PA to study motion pictures, and then received a 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 and Art Scene magazines.
[edit] Visual Music
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.
[edit] Formalist Motion Pictures
Using psychological studies of motion perception, Betancourt has argued [1] 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.
[edit] As Artist
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. 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." [2]
The Experimental TV Center's Video History Project has a biography.
[edit] Notable Works
[edit] Videos
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- Aurora, 2001 Microcinema International
- She, My Memory, 2002 review, IMDB
- Year, 2003 review
- Telemetry, 2005 review
[edit] 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. [3]
[edit] 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
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Books
- Structuring Time, 2004
- Re–Viewing Miami, 2004
- Visual Music Instrument Patents (Volume 1), 2004
- The Lumonics Theater, 2005
- Mary Hallock–Greenewalt: The Complete Patents, 2005
- Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux, 2006
[edit] Essays
- Educating Buffy: The Role of Education in Buffy the Vampire–Slayer, 1998 [4]
- Disruptive Technology: The Avant-Gardness of Avant-Garde Art, 2002 [5]
- Motion Perception in Movies and Painting: Towards a New Kinetic Art, 2002 [6]
- Labor/Commodity/Automation: A Response to "The Digital Death Rattle of the American Middle Class", 2004 [7]
- Abstract Film Palimpsests: On the Work of Rey Parla, 2006 [8]
