Michael Betancourt is a critical theorist and research artist who has cultivated a diverse practice addressing media history, digital technology, and capitalist ideology. Author of more than thirty books, his deeply interdisciplinary writing has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, and Spanish. His analysis considers the contemporary global financialization of digital capitalism via the social and cultural impacts of AI, Bitcoin, surveillance, and Universal Basic Income (inter alia) as reflections of structural demands implicit in how the Enlightenment project informs both historical industrial capitalism and contemporary digital technology. This critical analysis provides a model and foundation for his studio work. He is a board member of the Art of Light Organization.
