Pete McPartlan

I got the 60 day domain renewal notice for a blog that I had been writing: from x to x and I’ve decided to kill it. It’s a place I had been using for writing whatever thoughts came into my head about art. Lots of it is silly speculation, uncontrolled and full of odd tangents and I had been keeping it quiet at the time because I was unsure really of it’s use for anyone other than myself and didn’t feel confident about letting people see my brain-wee. Some of the more curious posts include:

From Subjective Randomness to Infinite Go

From (more) Video Soup to Anti-Narrative Arcs

From the Basingstoke of the Internet to The Cinema of Things

But one or two good things did come out of it, like the idea to work with cassettemaster’s videos for future everything and the beginnings of a couple of other video pieces. I’ve decided to focus on one of the concepts that arose from there and start a new blog with more manageable parameters:

Basingstoke of the Internet

It’s about scraping the barrel of youtube for the least aesthetically oriented videos – crate digging for accidental echoes of the dry structuralist wit of Morgan Fisher or the zen of Takahiko Iimura.

From the about page:

I had the misfortune of growing up in Andover. Basingstoke was the nearest town with anything in it, like a cinema that showed recent films and a laser quest. Basingstoke itself is a warren of shopping malls surrounded by a office blocks and roundabouts. It has come to represent to me a particular type of dry, dull, corporate tediousness – a drab dystopia of sweaty business lunches, poor town planning and animated power points. The internet is full of video that has slipped out of similar grey, bureaucratic hives around the world and some of it is of curious interest. Shot by people with no particular skill, trying to document facts they often show glimpses of something else. The tedious video is very much a product of the digital age – before youtube it was hidden, now it is all public domain, embeddable and here to reflect upon. I plan to collect the most/least interesting here.

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” John Cage

Or as my gran put it: “Only boring people get bored.”