Digital Typoetry: An Asemic Continuation

Michael Betancourt (1971) is a Cuban-American research artist who has cultivated a conceptual-theoretical studio practice focused on art history, digital technology, and capitalist ideology; evident in his books Glitch Theory (2023), The Critique of Digital Capitalism (2016), and Glitch Art in Theory and Practice (2017). A pioneer of “Glitch Art,” he has been making visually seductive digital art since 1990, which has brought the visionary tradition into the present by glitching still and moving images. By emphasizing their digital origins, his aesthetics express a consistent concern for the poetic potential of the overlooked and neglected products of digital computers. His asemic poetry made from glitched and fragmented typography has been published by RedFox Press, Timglaset, nOIR:Z, and Post-Asemic Press, and in Die Lerre Mitte, Utsanga.it, and aurapoesiavisual. The Society of Typographic Arts in Chicago selected his typoetry book CMYK as a winner in the 45th annual STA100 (2023).