What do glitches reveal about the normally invisible processes behind our interpretations?

Glitches and Glitch Art illuminate the unseen assumptions, ideology of dialectical thinking, and role of established knowledge that shapes as well as determines our engagement with the world. Betancourt builds on the role of perception in guiding these interpretations to explore the possibilities offered by glitches for addressing digital media. Not confined to esoteric questions of semiosis, this study presents an expansive model of ambivalence and ambiguity whose ramifications address how initial assumptions and beliefs create meaning.

Tracking glitches across technical media old and new, and moving from early abstraction's attempts to visualize a transcendental spiritualism through to contemporary AI generated art and media, Betancourt describes how glitches are not just technical failures but products of the instabilities between human interpretations and autonomous machinic operations that create a 'discursive aesthetic' guided by cultural fantasies of digital media's immateriality that idealize it as a perfect, transcendent form.

A journey to the roots of meaning itself, Betancourt offers a paradigm that unpacks how engaging the glitch can become a critical model not only for artists, critics, and academics, but for anyone interested in Contemporary Art, tactical media, and cultural activism.

all illustrations in full color

A Short Guide to Writing About Motion Graphics is the one essential textbook for any student writing critically about non-narrative motion pictures. This book explains in accessible language what research is for and how to use it when writing critical examinations of motion pictures that do not tell stories. Explained using clear examples taken from published writing, this book shows how to approach a writing assignment from beginning to completion, covering such topics as The Purpose of Research, How to Create and Use a Close Reading, The Relationship Between Writing and Revision, and Common Problems and Their Solutions. This book is an essential guide for any student writing about motion graphics. The process it presents has one simple goal: writing clearly for publication.

Art, AI and Culture interrogates the aesthetic heritage of Modernism as it informs contemporary cultural applications of AI which demonstrate there is no escape from the kaleidoscopic lineage of colonialism where the status of human and all the rights that entails were withheld from the colonized in general, and from slaves, labor, and women specifically. This analysis theorizes the social identity threat posed by AI's challenges to existing social, cultural, political, and economic orders. Digital technology is not exempt from this historical lineage that transforms familiar questions of economic displacement caused by machine learning and digital automation into new battles in an on-going conflict over social status and position. This cultural approach to AI reveals the ways that it transforms expressions of identity, leisure and luxury into opportunities for profit extraction. Social phenomena, (including racism, sexism, and nationalism), capture individuals in a web of systemic control where digital automation provides a mechanism preserving the existing hierarchies and social status that it might otherwise challenge. Drawing on a reconception of capitalism as a proxy for social status and position, this study critiques of the fantasy that replacing all human labor will create a fully automated luxury utopia without bias, oppression, or social change.

With full color images.

Expand your knowledge of the aesthetics, forms and meaning of motion graphics as well as the long-running connections between the American avant-garde film, video art and TV commercials. In 1960 avant-garde animator and inventor John Whitney started a company called Motion Graphics, Inc. to make animated titles and logos. His new company crystalized a relationship between avant-garde film and commercial broadcast design/film titles. Careful discussion of historical works puts them in context, allowing their reappearance in contemporary motion graphics clear. This book includes a thorough examination of the history of title design from the earliest films through the present, including Walter Anthony, Saul Bass, Maurice Binder, Pablo Ferro, Wayne Fitzgerald, Nina Saxon, and Kyle Cooper. This book also covers early abstract film (the Futurists Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna, Leopold Survage, Walther Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, Mary Ellen Bute, Len Lye and Norman McLaren) and puts the work of visual music pioneers Mary Hallock-Greenewalt and Thomas Wilfred in context. The History of Motion Graphics is the essential textbook and general reference for understanding how and where the field of motion graphic design came from and where it's going.

Anything that can be automated, will be. The magic that digital technology has brought us - self-driving cars, Bitcoin, high frequency trading, the internet of things, social networking, mass surveillance, the 2009 housing bubble - has not been considered from an ideological perspective. The Critique of Digital Capitalism identifies how digital technology has captured contemporary society in a reification of capitalist priorities, and also describes digital capitalism as an ideologically invisible framework that is realized in technology. Written as a series of articles between 2003 and 2015, the book 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 that are 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, whereby digital production supposedly eliminates costs and makes everything equally available to everyone. This fantasy of production without consumption hides the physical costs and real-world impacts of these technologies.

The critique introduced in this book develops from basic questions about how digital technologies directly change the structure of society: why is Digital Rights Management not only the dominant solution for distributing digital information, but also the only option being considered? During the burst of the Housing Bubble burst 2009, why were the immaterial commodities being traded of primary concern, but the actual physical assets and the impacts on the people living in them generally ignored? How do surveillance (pervasive monitoring) and agnotology (culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data) coincide as mutually reinforcing technologies of control and restraint? If technology makes the assumptions of its society manifest as instrumentality - then what ideology is being realized in the form of the digital computer? This final question animates the critical framework this analysis proposes.

Digital capitalism is a dramatically new configuration of the historical dynamics of production, labor and consumption that results in a new variant of historical capitalism. This contemporary, globalized network of production and distribution depends on digital capitalism's refusal of established social restraints: existing laws are an impediment to the transcendent aspects of digital technology. Its utopian claims mask its authoritarian result: the superficial objectivity of computer systems are supposed to replace established protections with machinic function - the uniform imposition of whatever ideology informs the design. However, machines are never impartial: they reify the ideologies they are built to enact. The critical analysis of capitalist ideologies as they become digital is essential to challenging this process. Contesting their domination depends on theoretical analysis. This critique challenges received ideas about the relationship between labor, commodity production and value, in the process demonstrating how the historical Marxist analysis depends on assumptions that are no longer valid. This book therefore provides a unique, critical toolset for the analysis of digital capitalist hegemonics.

Research Art: glitches, poetics, typography and the aura of the digital is about margins and marginality in the art world as sources for critical engagements in the studio. It builds on the pioneering work of critical theorist and artist Michael Betancourt, who has used glitches as an integral part of his art since the early 1990s. This book presents his thinking about his own work linking theory and practice in a larger context of conceptual and theoretical concerns that are neither a statement of intentions, nor merely a subjective series of claims about past accomplishments. With 21 illustrations in full color, this book discusses his digital glitch movies, typoetry, abstract photography, and the Instaglitch series as direct examples of the connections between theory and practice, illuminating his proposal for Research Art as a domain equal to the Business Art familiar from exhibitions in the gallery-fair-museum network. Polemical and often challenging, it explores the role of expectations in making and interpreting art from the vantage point of the studio, rather than as a critic or historian, arguing that Research Art is the evolution of the critical position developed by Conceptual Art and Situationalism as the avant-garde program in art came to an end, an adaptation to the changed Contemporary reality of AI, globalization, and digital technology-an oppositional art made in the shadows of digital capitalism.

Expand your knowledge of the aesthetics, forms and meaning of motion graphics as well as the long-running connections between the American avant-garde film, video art and TV commercials. In 1960 avant-garde animator and inventor John Whitney started a company called Motion Graphics, Inc. to make animated titles and logos. His new company crystalized a relationship between avant-garde film and commercial broadcast design/film titles. Careful discussion of historical works puts them in context, allowing their reappearance in contemporary motion graphics clear. This book includes a thorough examination of the history of title design from the earliest films through the present, including Walter Anthony, Saul Bass, Maurice Binder, Pablo Ferro, Wayne Fitzgerald, Nina Saxon, and Kyle Cooper. This book also covers early abstract film (the Futurists Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna, Leopold Survage, Walther Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, Mary Ellen Bute, Len Lye and Norman McLaren) and puts the work of visual music pioneers Mary Hallock-Greenewalt and Thomas Wilfred in context. The History of Motion Graphics is the essential textbook and general reference for understanding how and where the field of motion graphic design came from and where it's going.

The Book of Dissolution is a work of visual poetry composed from forty-two carefully curated compositions produced between 1998 and 2020. Dissolution means the decomposition into fragments or parts, a disintegration that returns the established order to its component elements-but this breaking up does not mean an end to order, merely the conversion from one state to another, more dynamic one. These images are a meditation on this process of ordering and transformation. These images are a meditation on this process of ordering and transformation, a sequence of images, like an animation without the in-between frames.

Visual Music Instrument Patents Volume One is a collection of primary source documents for visual music instruments, often called color organs, gleaned from the United States Patent Office. Information about these devices is often only available through the inventor's patent applications, but these applications are not currently available except through the time-consuming process of searching Patent Office databases. This volume is an informational resource for those instruments that are already known and studied (Bishop, Rimington, Wilfred, Fischinger), and includes a number of patents for other instruments that have not been examined as thoroughly (Munsell, Hallock-Greenwalt, others). Volume One also includes a few patents that are related to visual music instruments such as systems of notation for writing visual music and devices for determining color harmony through a relationship to musical form.

This anthology brings together the few essays on Lumia that were published during Thomas Wilfred's lifetime. Wilfred, an artist who experimented with a form of visual music he called Lumia developed an entire aesthetic system that could either be performed live, or set-up as an automatic display. His instrument, the Clavilux, was subject of several patents, collected along with images from Opus 161. Together these essays, the patents, and selected images provide a clear description of Lumia, what Wilfred described as the eighth art.

A NEW KINETIC ART: This book presents a new approach to the conceptual basis of all visual art, and while it is about making movies -- the catch-all for video, film, computer graphics and anything else that may appear to move -- the thrust of this book is a radical redefinition of all visual media, including traditional standards like painting. The framework these notes propose is a way of thinking about visual art that eliminates all former media in favor of a division based on our ability to see movement or change in a work of art. While most movies change and move rapidly, this understanding is equally concerned with the very slow, or apparently immobile. (Revised and Expanded Second Edition.)

A collage novel following in tradition started by surreal artist Max Ernst. It follows the story of two sisters and a mysterious creature called The Nightengale, chronicling their journeys. A fun and fabulous exploration of myth and metaphor.

Artemis A Tragedy of Collage is a fantasy of mythological proportions where the story we see is the fantasy of the title character whose journey causes her to lose sight of reality. Filled with fantastical beasts and evocative imagery, Michael Betancourt's second collage novel is both epic in scale and powerful in impact.

The ENnie Award nominated Toonzy is a fun and zany cartoon role-playing game. It has funny characters who do hilarious and outlandish things, engage in slapstick comedy, encounter bizarre scenarios, and parody real life. That is to say, this a game in which the players (that's you) take on the role of a cartoon character and engage in collaborative storytelling. You create a character and pretend to be it while acting out your character's role. The game is based on the choices you make-the actions your character takes within the game world. The referee for the game is called the Director. They help narrate, arbitrate, and run the game session, making sure that the rules of the game are followed and provide the material for jokes and stunts. It takes three or more people to play the game properly.

Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics 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.

Harmonia, harmonies, analyzes the connections between glitch art, visual music, abstraction, and motion pictures. It is a theory and a critique of visual music.

This collection is a chronological survey of artistic research into, around, and with digital motion pictures. The result unveils a theory of both visual music and abstraction, one that is directly connected to a critical engagement with the socio-cultural meaning of visionary art that builds on the work of Umberto Eco and Michel Foucault to engage with the historical films of John Whitney, Mary Ellen Bute, Mark Hallock-Greenewalt, and Stan Brakhage. Included are the essays The Aura of the Digital, The Invention of Glitch Video, and Welcome to Cyberia along with many other talks, publications, and analyses of glitch art and visual music, surveying glitch art pioneer Michael Betancourt's critical/theoretical engagements with these art forms.

Harmonia, harmonies, analyzes the connections between glitch art, visual music, abstraction, and motion pictures. It is a theory and a critique of visual music.

This collection is a chronological survey of artistic research into, around, and with digital motion pictures. The result unveils a theory of both visual music and abstraction, one that is directly connected to a critical engagement with the socio-cultural meaning of visionary art that builds on the work of Umberto Eco and Michel Foucault to engage with the historical films of John Whitney, Mary Ellen Bute, Mark Hallock-Greenewalt, and Stan Brakhage. Included are the essays The Aura of the Digital, The Invention of Glitch Video, and Welcome to Cyberia along with many other talks, publications, and analyses of glitch art and visual music, surveying glitch art pioneer Michael Betancourt's critical/theoretical engagements with these art forms.

This book develops a critical and theoretical approach to the semiotics of motion pictures as they are applied to a broader range of constructions than traditional commercial narrative productions.

This interdisciplinary approach begins with the problems posed by motion perception to develop a model of cinematic interpretation that includes both narrative and non-narrative types of productions. Contrasting traditional theatrical projection and varieties of new media, this book integrates analyses of title sequences, music videos, and visual effects with discussions on classic and avant-garde films. It further explores the intersection between formative audio-visual cues identified by viewers and how viewers' desires direct engagement with the motion picture to present a framework for understanding cinematic articulation. This new theoretical model incorporates much of what was neglected and gives greater prominence to formerly critical marginal productions by showing the fundamental connections that link all moving imagery and animated text, whether it tells a story or not.

This insightful work will appeal to students and academics in film and media studies.

This book explores the question of realism in motion pictures. Specifically, it explores how understanding the role of realism in the history of title sequences in film can illuminate discussions raised by the advent of digital cinema.

Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequences, Motion Graphics and Cinema fills a critical and theoretical void in the existing literature on motion graphics. Developed from careful analysis of André Bazin, Stanley Cavell, and Giles Deleuze's approaches to cinematic realism, this analysis uses title sequences to engage the interface between narrative and non-narrative media to consider cinematic realism in depth through highly detailed close readings of the title sequences for Bullitt (1968), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), The Number 23 (2007), The Kingdom (2008), Blade Runner: 2049 (2017) and the James Bond films. From this critique, author Michael Betancourt develops a modal approach to cinematic realism where ontology is irrelevant to indexicality. His analysis shows the continuity between historical analogue film and contemporary digital motion pictures by developing a framework for rethinking how realism shapes interpretation.

In his third book on the semiotics of title sequences, Title Sequences as Paratexts, theorist Michael Betancourt offers an analysis of the relationship between the title sequence and its primary text--the narrative whose production the titles credit. Using a wealth of examples drawn from across film history--ranging from White Zombie (1931), Citizen Kane (1940) and Bullitt (1968) to Prince of Darkness (1987), Mission: Impossible (1996), Sucker Punch (2011) and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)--Betancourt develops an understanding of how the audience interprets title sequences as instances of paranarrative, simultaneously engaging them as both narrative exposition and as credits for the production. This theory of cinematic paratexts, while focused on the title sequence, has application to trailers, commercials, and other media as well.