Harmonia

Auteur

Michael Betancourt is a pioneer of "Glitch Art" who has made visually seductive digital art that brings the visionary tradition into the present. Dividing his studio time between working with static and moving imagery, his approach to digital misfunction has set the stage for the contemporary mania for glitch art. Since 1990, he has cultivated a diverse practice unified by 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. By emphasizing their digital origins, his aesthetics encourages the viewer to find poetic meaning in their everyday life. His static imagery primarily displayed on his Instagram account (@glitcharts) links the digital rendering of files to the patterns of wood grain in Japanese woodblock prints of the nineteenth century, reveling in the continuity between contemporary digital abstraction and historical art.

Texte du rabat

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.