Michael Betancourt has cultivated a conceptual-theoretical practice that combines media art production with discursive, critical analysis focused on art history, digital technology, and capitalist ideology.
A pioneer of "Glitch Art," he has made visually seductive digital art that brings the visionary tradition into the present by glitching still and moving images since 1990. By emphasizing their digital origins, his aesthetics express a consistent concern for the poetic potential of the overlooked and neglected images made by digital computers: the "glitched" images that are commonly ignored and rejected. His movies and statics have shown internationally at film festivals and art fairs, including Art Basel Miami Beach, Athens Video Art Festival, the Black Maria Film Festival, Contemporary Art Ruhr, Festival des Cinemas Differents de Paris, Millennium Film Workshop, the San Francisco Cinematheque's Crossroads, and Experiments in Cinema, among many others. His interactive publication the ____________ Manifesto is a well known work of interactive net.art from the 1990s. One of his games-as-art, Toonzy! The Cartoon Role-Playing Game, was nominated for an Ennie Award as Best Free Game in 2016. This aesthetic work is informed by ground breaking historical research: in 2006, he found the oldest surviving hand-painted abstract films (produced in 1916 by Mary Hallock-Greenewalt). He also wrote the first history of motion graphics in the United States from its origins to the commercial appropriation of avant-garde film and video art.
Author of more than thirty books, his deeply interdisciplinary writing has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, and Spanish. His analysis considers the contemporary global financialization of digital capitalism via the social and cultural impacts of AI, Bitcoin, surveillance, and Universal Basic Income (inter alia) as reflections of structural demands implicit in how the Enlightenment project informs both historical industrial capitalism and contemporary digital technology. This critical analysis provides a model and foundation for his studio work. He is a board member of the Art of Light Organization. His theory of digital capitalism is the first materialist analysis of how globalized financialization, digital technology and the autonomous production of the internet have converged in the past 40 years; his book The Critique of Digital Capitalism was published by Punctum Books on January 7, 2016. The theory proposed in this book is the description of how digital capitalism as an ideologically “invisible” framework realized in technology. Originally a series of articles published between 2003 and 2015, it provides a broad critical scope for understanding the inherent demands of capitalist protocols for expansion without constraint—regardless of social, legal or ethical limits—that are increasingly being realized as autonomous systems no longer dependent on human labor or oversight and implemented without social discussion of their impacts. The digital illusion of infinite resources, infinite production, and no costs appears as an “end to scarcity,” that digital production eliminates costs and makes everything equally available to everyone. He was interviewed on The Keiser Report to discuss his work on digital capitalism (episode 130, episode 199, episode 894 [Part 1] and episode 895 [Part 2]).
As artist, he has exhibited his movies, site-specific installations, and non-traditional art forms in unseen, unusual, or public spaces since 1992, and he has used digital failures and technical glitches in his movies since 1996. He has collaborated with a variety of film makers and musicians in producing his movies, including Charles Recher, Rey Parlá, Dennis H. Miller, The Poison Arrows, Sa’eed Ali and FsLux. His movies have been shown in galleries, film festivals and art fairs internationally. A book about his working process, Structuring Time came out in 2004 and was revised in 2009.
He began producing guerilla interventions in public spaces in 1996 with The TrueLife Ad Campaign, a project that assumed the form of a newspaper ad. Since then, he has produced a series of interventions in public spaces designed to provoke an active engagement with the viewer—his Non-Art Object sticker was included in the book Stickers: Stuck-Up Piece of Crap—From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art.
Betancourt was a co-curator of the independent video series The Experimental Show that ran in Miami from 2000 to 2003. In 2006, he produced The iota Center’s Visual Music From Iota DVD anthology. He has written extensively on contemporary artist Jose Parlá, including on his collaboration with photograffeur JR in Havana, Cuba.
He spent his childhood summers at the Kommos archaeological excavation, in Pitsidia, Crete, Greece; starting in 1986, he worked for several years as the Staff Photographer on the Pseira archaeological excavation, in Crete; this excavation was run by his father, Philip Betancourt, and Costis Davaras. In the early 1990s he worked as an Assistant Editor, then as Art Director for a revived version of Weird Tales started by George H. Scithers, Darrell Schweitzer and his brother, John Betancourt. During this same period he began screening his movies and showing in art galleries.
