Michael Bentancourt
Michael Betancourt began working with digital errors and breakdowns, what is now called 'Glitch Art,' in 1990 when the NewTek Video Toaster he was using to color shift a video malfunctioned and output a series of flickering and shifting patterns instead of what he was expecting. He welcomed this discovery; he had looked for ways to induce the kinds of generative imagery these glitches created since writing his first computer animation programs on an Apple II in 1979. His experimental photographs, created purely in the darkroom during the 1980s, provided a foundation for handling the uncontrolled aspects of both moving and static digital glitches during the 1990s; however, the aesthetic embrace of visual glitches lagged several years behind their use in electronic music, leading him to conceive of glitched footage as simply one more category of material to manipulate and combine with more traditional imagery. His pioneering work with glitching digital video at the end of the twentieth century anticipated contemporary processes and techniques, such as "datamoshing" and "pixelsorting," before these methods became codified and familiar. Inducing errors and exploiting systemic faults has remained a source of imagery throughout his movies and statics, which deploy glitches as a critique of contemporary media culture. He has consistently invented ways to exploit the inherent instabilities in all digital systems, compositing visually seductive challenges to their normative operations. His recent movies exploit the dynamic range of contemporary digital cameras that far exceed what traditional film can detect, integrating those results with glitch processes. The fusion of the glitched and unglitched has remained a feature of his work throughout his career, guided by his internationally prominent publications as a critical theorist addressing digital capitalism and media semiotics.
