VITRINE
EXHIBITION SERIES
MAY 10 – JUN 10, 2024
Michael Betancourt
Haunted
Haunted includes AI-generated artworks by new media artist Michael Betancourt. The exhibition features a new animation exploring concepts of “hauntology” by imagining a socio-cultural past within a landscape haunted by ghostly fragmented and flickering images. The exhibition also features a series of digital images created from recent AI glitch experiments.
“…memory itself may be hazy, incomplete, and tinged with a sense of the uncanny…”
— Michael Betancourt
Michael Betancourt is a critical theorist and research artist who works with movies and static imagery. A pioneer of “glitch,” he has worked with databending images and video since the 1990s. He produced his first visually seductive glitch works by bringing the visionary tradition into the present: by emphasizing their digital origins, his aesthetics allows the viewer to find poetic meaning in everyday life. His movies and statics have shown internationally at film festivals and art fairs, including the Black Maria Film Festival, Art Basel Miami Beach, Contemporary Art Ruhr, Athens Video Art Festival, Festival des Cinemas Differents de Paris, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, the San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads, and Experiments in Cinema, among others.
Haunted Landscape
2024, AI-generated animation
Artist’s Statement About the Work
Haunted Landscape is a new animation that explores the concept of ‘hauntology,’ visualizing the persistence of the socio-cultural past in a space literally ‘haunted’ by drifting white ghostly shapes: fragmented, flickering forms within an abstract field organized by the iconography of landscape—horizons, framing, sky. This movie mirrors the way memory itself may be hazy, incomplete, and tinged with a sense of the uncanny, inviting the audience to contemplate the fragile nature of their present, and the ways in which the past continues to shape and determine our experiences. It is made from extensively glitched footage of the animated film ‘The Skeleton Dance’ (1929), a movie that itself haunts the history of media art, a doubling and redoubling of the distant, hidden causes (imagery) which define cinematic experience as both immediate and recollection.
The Static series of digital images featured in this exhibition are iterative AI-generated stills produced by making minute changes to model weights. I was looking at what happens when incompatible LORA models that manage details in diffusion systems are set to collide with each other. The result is they cancel each other out and what appears is a computational product without producing any image (in fact the text prompts have no impact at all). The models generate the same image every time if the seed values are the same and the model weighting is the same. It's the irrelevance of the text prompts that makes me say these are unquestionably glitched outputs.