Media theorist, video maker and installation artist Michael Betancourt will share his creative point of view in a series of events set for Feb. 23-26, 2006.

The events associated with the Betancourt residency are listed below. They are free and open to the public.

Public Lecture "Visual Music and the Birth of Abstract Act"
Thursday, Feb. 23, 12:00 - 1:00 p.m
UNO Art Gallery

In considering the history of visual music a network of connections between visual music, synaesthesia, early abstract painting in the twentieth century, and the development of both abstract film and instruments for creating visual music presents the theoretical possibility for proposing an alternative historical development for abstract art than the materialist formalism best known in the work of Clement Greenberg. Greenberg's ideas about abstraction arguing for the autonomy of art obfuscate abstraction's appearance in the 1910s and 1920s. By examining how these ideas continued to develop in abstract film, and their origins with synaesthesia and visual music in Romanticism and earlier, it is possible to theorize the existence of a competing tradition of synaesthetic abstraction that places abstract film and visual music centrally in its development.

Screening: Video Works by Michael Betancourt
Q&A with the artist to follow the screening.
Thursday, Feb. 23, 7:00 - 8:00 p.m
UNO Art Gallery


Stills from Prima Matera

Reception/Transmission:
An Installation by Michael Betancourt
Saturday, Feb. 25, and Sunday, Feb. 26
10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day
UNO Art Gallery




Breakfast with Echotrope and Michael Betancourt
Saturday, Feb. 25, and Sunday, Feb. 26
10 to 11 a.m. each day
UNO Art Gallery