Roland Betancourt

Roland Betancourt is the author of Disneyland and the Rise of Automation from Princeton University Press. He is a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and, currently, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art.

In the physical world, automation makes itself manifest just below our perception through styles of movement: it is an aesthetics of pauses and paces; the time it takes for a sensor to reset or a vehicle to advance on a track, the forceful and jerky movements of brakes, the pregnant pauses of computers double-checking their actions. 

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Can’t Help Myself, 2016, as displayed in the 2019 Venice Biennale. KUKA industrial robot, stainless steel and rubber, cellulose ether in colored water, lighting grid with Cognex visual-recognition sensors, and polycarbonate wall with aluminum frame. © Sun Yuan & Peng Yu. Courtesy the artists.

Close

Home