This essay surveys a 20-year period of the author’s studio-based research into “spatial montage” and windowing, elaborating on his use of space imagery in a symbolic system describing the critique of fantasy::reality through symbols that are still used in the contemporary world—how the mythic dimensions of interpreting the “heavens” collide and contradict contemporary scientific interpretations. “Visionary” art is the dynamic focus, with the Moon as the central icon, providing a direct means for the author to consider ambiguities and complexities of symbolic transformation: earlier descriptions of heavens and Earth provide a visionary subtext to scientific exploration. The author considers himself a “revisionary” artist whose work engages the implicit semiotics of visionary film/visual music to problematize the pseudoscientific theories found there.

Issue Section:
Artists’ Articles
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©2015 ISAST
2015

Supplementary data

Contact Light

The first words broadcast from the moon were “Contact Light.” The haze of glitches are a reminder of the uncertainty of memory with even the documentation itself vanishes and all we are left with is the myth of the man in the moon. (Images © 2012, Michael Betancourt; some materials from NASA/JPL.)

- mp4 file
The Dark Rift

This movie explores the transformations of the Moon into the Dark Rift, a group of interstellar dust clouds whose alignment with the Sun marks the winter solstice, and which the Maya believed was the road to the underworld. (Images © 2014, Michael Betancourt; music © 2104 Dennis H. Miller)

- mp4 file
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