Millennium Film Workshop presents the first major survey of pioneering Glitch Artist Michael Betancourt's movies that glitch AI systems.

The problem of AI and art is one which dominates much of the modern discourse, with thinkpieces published daily by journalists, academics, artists, activists and advocates arguing the horrors, viability, toxicity, possible benefits and and most questionable of all, the future of this most controversial tool and its profound and strange implications. A common theme amongst this troubled discourse is the potential it has to “break” – thanks to AI, truth is “broken”, society is “broken”, art is “broken.” The picture painted by these takes is of an unstoppable force destroying all in its path, a bull in a cultural china shop. All this suggests however, that if AI breaks art, what art can be gleaned where AI is broken?

Film theorist and video artist Michael Betancourt has been among the foremost practitioners of “glitch art” for over three decades. Glitch explores the images which can be gleaned from the margins of where digital images go beyond their limitations. System errors and compression artifacts result in chance compositions of pictorial breakdown. These images of limitation exist at the outer frontier of all media, and Millennium Film Workshop is proud to be the first venue dedicated to moving image arts to present NOISE AS SIGNAL, a survey of Betancourt’s recent work exploring the outer limits of glitch through the lens of generative AI.

“I break things and play with the pieces; I realize this act is an historically nihilistic gesture, but that is not my interest: the flash of recognition—faces, words, stories, spaces—is my focus…The audience will see what their hopes and fears, education and desires taught/allow them to see, and because I’m not interested in technological determinism, formalist exploration, nor anything arbitrary and capricious, my focus is on articulating basic human emotions—ecstasy, sensuality, fascination—via encounters that encourage viewers to find poetic meaning in their everyday life…

Glitching is a procedural intervention in the normally seamless and ‘perfect’ operations of the digital system. It offers a tactical potential for artists to challenge the ideologies that are contained in these machines by forcing a stoppage where human intervention becomes essential. Determining when technology is “broken” is a product of cultural knowledge and expertise that remains constant…AI demands new solutions to the historical cultural and aesthetic problems confronting human agency in art. Rather than reverting to revanchist nineteenth century attempts to affirm human agency that merely reinscribe AI as an idealized other, (without addressing its fundamental challenge), a critical response requires a different solution that is neither a utopian claim which surrenders human agency to machines, nor a nostalgic return to familiar, traditional practices that emphasize physicality and subjectivity.”

Noise as Signal, opening Thursday, July 30th, with a reception in the Millennium Gallery at 7:00 PM followed by a screening of works and discussion with Michael Betancourt at 8:00 PM, is comprised of two parts: The Glitch Critique, a collection of Betancourt’s works, showcased on installation, tracing the formal, historical, political aspects of his Glitch Art from its origins in the 1990s to its current application in Al systems. The second part, The Machine Artist, A selection of Betancourt’s “AImaglitch” movies that induce failures in generative Al systems by setting models that exhibit different degrees of “overfit” (a technical problem where the dataset is trained to the point where it only does one thing, or just a few) against each other, the resulting images are products of an AI process where different stages cancel each other, resulting in imagery that ignores the text prompts and instructions, generating only what the datasets will allow.

This evening makes the political argument of Betancourt’s work with automation and digital systems explicit: the seamless AI image is not neutral, and the act of breaking it is not merely aesthetic.

The post-screening conversation will be open and unstructured.

Movies:
In the Exhibition: Going Somewhere, Contact Light, The Kodak Moment, the Dark Rift, Dogs of Space, Seeing/Counting, See Saw

In the Screening: Making Art is Speculative Labor, Mnemonic Fields, Animorphology, Five Bodyscapes, Chaise Longue (Olympia), Eastalgia, La Fée Électricité, Garden, The Nightmare, Fire and Ice, Zersetzung