Michael Betancourt

A meditation on the Moon as a series of spheres melting away. The audio-visuals are synchronized via a repeated glitch process: the same values that databent the visuals are also used to change the base audio samples, creating a translation between a visual glitch and an audible one, even though in the final presentation they seem entirely different.

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A series of 1 second lap dissolves between static Instaglitch images, glitched.

Directed by Michael Betancourt

Proposed in 1998 as a conceptual movie that only appeared in the program book, Unseen Film Substitution has been adapted as a notification to show on-screen during the Experiments in Cinema program itself for its 25th anniversary.

Directed by Michael Betancourt

Directed by Michael Betancourt

Directed by Michael Betancourt

Cyanotype video. Centrifugal force pushing against the figure/ground distinction. An agglomeration of abstract light/shadow play, set in motion to evoke the transcendental, sublime experience created through a fusion of traditional, analogue in-camera photographic techniques with digital animation and compositing. This movie was created primarily with in-camera techniques, supplemented with minimal digital compositing to join the various shots together. Drawing on the visionary tradition of Lumia, it transposes traditional optical approaches to digital imaging.

A glitchy rendering of outer space and an eye.

A short dramatizing the launch of two Soviet space dogs into orbit.

Directed by Michael Betancourt

Niagara pays homage to the Hudson River School landscape painting of the same title: swirling colors and shapes evoke the grandeur of its namesake waterfall. Produced while Artist in Residence at the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University, and made using Lumia, a Sandin Image Processor, and a BPMC HDK-01 digital glitch processor, the imagery evokes the flows and turbulence of falling water in motion. The continuous stream of the digital-electronic signal becomes a mirror for the flow of water and passage of light (Lumia) that is both the vehicle of presentation and the initial subject matter being transformed.

Three years of experiments with the direct manipulation of light at ISO51,200 produced this single long take, presented without editing. The patterns and suggestions of faces that emerge are pure pareidolia, ghostly apparitions that exist only in the mind of the viewer. All these in-camera patterns were augmented by superimposing the glitch processes of databending and datamoshing without altering the progression of the images to blend kinetic abstract light with digital errors and seamlessly produce a transformation of what might be an uncomfortable error into a sublime encounter with the ghosts of the digital. The soundtrack provides an essential counterpoint to these movements, a meditation on gestures made and received by the antenna of a Theremin. These abstract translations of physical motion closer to and farther away from the receiver provide a direct parallel to the doppler transformations that define redshift.