Two Videos

Angular Momentum
5:00, 2020, HD (1920×1080)
music by Jean-Philippe Feiss

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.

Bubbles in Koilon
5:00, 2020, HD (1920×1080)
music by Jean-Philippe Feiss

A hypnotic visual music piece made from the poetry of bokeh and optical distortions. Kinetic movements of the abstract exchange between form and substance, light and darkness, real and unseen that lie at the limits of perception are a ‘creation myth’ for optics, evoking a noumenal experience from the effervescence of illumination and kinesis. Made using a digital camera recording at ISO 51200 allowing the internal functions of the camera optics to become the image.

Michael Betancourt (b. 1971, United States) 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. Over the next decade, he worked with inducing and modulating errors in both static digital files, photochemical photographs, and analogue video, but the acceptance of visual glitches in art lagged several years behind their embrace in electronic music, leading to his understanding of glitched footage as simply one more category of material to manipulate and employ alongside more traditional imagery. His pioneering work with digital video glitches at the end of the twentieth century anticipated processes and techniques, such as “datamoshing” and “pixelsorting,” before these methods became codified and familiar.