Art Pete Pete Ashton is (becoming) an artist
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TTV Pete – A History
In 2006 I came across a new way of taking photos. At an early Birmingham Flickrmeet Stuart Parker was wielding a cardboard tube with an old camera stuck at the bottom. He poked his digital camera in the slot and clicked away. Later we saw his photos on the Flickr group and next month half [...]
Fran’s Room
Last year I built a website for Francesca Millican-Slater, a performer who had recently relocated to Birmingham. When I visited her to discuss this I was struck by how batshit crazy her flat was. Converted from offices above some shops in a suburb of Kings Heath it had post-war wood panelling and the maddest carpet [...]
River Rea Welly Walk
Update: Due to snow and a lack of Spring I’ve decided to postpone this until falling in the river is a less frightening prospect. It will happen though. I promise. I’ve had this idea for a walk and it’s not really to do with photography so I’m going to do it as an Art-Pete thing, [...]
BYOB photo zoom loop
Ant asked me to do something with the Bring Your Own Beamer: Birmingham photos. These were his instructions. * 1 minute long * 640 x 480 * No audio * Jump straight into photos i.e. no title screens or fading * Keep effects to a minimum * Make it awesome I sat on it for [...]
Favicons 3, 2, 1
A quick piece based on a series of files which caught my eye on my Mac. This is intended to be printed at A3.
KiteCam on my Beamer
Here’s the video I’m projecting on the walls at Bring Your Own Beamer, and event I’ve curated with Antonio Roberts. It’ll run on a loop for three hours. It takes place at Vivid in Digbeth, Birmingham, on Friday March 16th from 7-10pm. I believe we have 21 projectors confirmed, all running at the same time. [...]
Skype Grid
I did an hour long interview today over Skype. The video was sent to me for reference (I very rarely remember what I say in conversations so it’s handy to review in case I said anything stupid or useful) and I was intrigued by how static I was. Partly because it was done relatively early [...]
Railroad Towns video
Railroad Towns by Friends of the Stars Last January I shot a video for Friends of the Stars, a Brummie / Scots country folk band whose Birmingham contingent live near to me. We went for a walk around the Lifford Reservoir and I recorded sequences through my TTV contraption. Using the motor drive function I [...]
Outer Circle
As part of 11-11-11, a psychogeographic exploration of Birmingham’s Outer Circle bus route on November 11th in 2009, I chose to cycle the route and create a photographic record of the bus stops. By focusing identikit street furniture placed at strategic points along Europe’s longest bus route, I hoped to develop an understanding of Birmingham, [...]
BYOB Prelinger
I’m currently involved with curating an event as part of the Flatpack Festival called Bring Your Own Beamer (BYOB) on March 16th at Vivid. BYOB is an event where artists bring the own digital projector and laptop and everyone shows their work at the same time in the same room. It’s the brainchild of Antonio [...]
Averaged Selly Oak
The other week I paid a visit to Claire Farrell of EC-Arts who was setting up the base for her current project 48 Sheet in one of the many empty shop units in the Mailbox. Claire, you’ll remember, was responsible for my exhibition at the Library last year which challenged me in such a way [...]
Jupiter
Inspired by Prof Cox and his astronomy television program, and on learning the planet Jupiter would be visible tonight, I wrapped up warm, slapped a long lens on the camera, set up the tripod and tried my hand as astrophotography. It’s not easy. But while my photos might consist of blurry pixels I thought I’d [...]
Koyaanisqatsi Average Pixels
After the IMG_4228 experiments I was pointed by Hannah to Jason Salavon’s work, reducing frames of a movie down to 1 pixel and displaying them in sequence. It’s similar in ways to the movie barcodes but visually closer to my final piece. So I thought I’d give it a go. I’d recently gotten around to [...]
IMG_4228 Average Pixel Canvas
After the last post I was going to leave this for a day or so but I couldn’t help having a go. The natural next step for me, having gathered a bunch of photos together, was to pixelate them in some manner. I tried a basic 12×12 but it didn’t do much other than create [...]
IMG 4228 Flickr Dump
After slicing through YouTube using the filename IMG_4228 I thought I’d try the same with Flickr. As you might expect there are a lot more items on Flickr that haven’t been renamed from that machine-generated filename, 30,118 at the time of writing with 4 or 5 being added each day. My plan was to download [...]
IMG 4228 Desktop Players
This is a work in progress. Other itterations of this project may emerge in time. I recently uploaded a video to YouTube straight from my camera. The filename was “IMG_4228.mov” and I didn’t change it immediately. By the time I did the suggested videos in the sidebar included a significant number titled IMG 4228. I [...]
Pixel Hunt
I’ve been experimenting recently with cropping tiny details from photographs and blowing them up to A3 dimensions. It’s still a work in progress as I haven’t actually had any A3 prints made (that will be the proof) but I’m pleased with the process so far. A couple of days ago I saw a non-fox hunt [...]
Laptop Scratch
My Macbook battery gave up the ghost this weekend so I ordered a new one. On replacing it I noticed all the scratches caused by four years of constant use on a wide variety of surfaces. I thought it might be interesting to record them for posterity and investigate them further so I scanned the [...]
Undertow
A video from 2010 which was done as a test but which I think holds up well. Using my old TTV contraption I tracked a sailboat as it moved across Edgbaston Reservoir taking 2-3 photos every second. Next I layered them in photoshop and matched the horizons. Saving each layer as an image I then [...]
Bees Under The House
A short film from last year when we discovered a nest of relatively endangered bumble bees were nesting under our floorboard. They came and went through a airbrick which I positioned a video camera in front of. While the bees are pleasing I’m also interested in the fixed unblinking gaze and the ambient suburban sounds.
Pixel Dawn
An accident that is more interesting for the reasons I find it interesting that in itself. Occurred during the process of making this.
H Lucier
A few things have been coming my way recently, feeding into my notions of art and aesthetics. The principle one was the GLI.TC/H festival my friend Antonio Roberts curated in Birmingham last month where I did the video/photography stuff. I’m still processing the details and wouldn’t want to make any pronouncements, but there’s the seed [...]
TTV sale at People Shop this Christmas
I’m selling off my small framed TTV prints at The People Shop in Kings Heath this Christmas. Previously £15 each they’re now £10 which, a saving of 33.333%. People have the core range shown above plus loads more I made on a whim – eighty five 5″ frames in total, each print signed in silver [...]
In Parks
The other day James at Stan’s Cafe posted something about parks, noting there were 500 of them in Birmingham. The council website says 600 though this includes “public open spaces” which, as Emma pointed out, means patches like this. View Larger Map I was quite taken by the number, which is large and yet still [...]