ZERSETZUNG

Michael Betancourt

 

FILE SÃO PAULO 2026: Inter-creativity – Art and Technology – Animation
Electronic Language International Festival

 

Zersetzung – United States

The term “Zersetzung” [decomposition] identifies the psychological repression employed by the Stasi in the DDR that attacked their victims’ self-perception, confidence, and capacity for resistance through deliberate alienation and paranoia. Victims found themselves isolated, doubting their own memories and relationships, as the secret police manipulated their social environment to create chronic uncertainty about what is real, true, authentic; precisely the same instabilities created by AI.

BIO

Michael Betancourt is a distinguished Cuban-American (Latinx) critical theorist, moviemaker, and research artist known for his work in the fields of digital capitalism, motion graphics, and Glitch Art; a pioneer of Glitch Art, he has made visually seductive digital art since 1990 that brings the visionary tradition into the present by glitching still and moving images.