I’m showing Origami Seizure Comparison in programme organised by Deep Leap Microcinema, called Kill Your Idols the first screening will be in Brooklyn at Microscope gallery on the 14th. From Deep Leap’s site:

“A program of works that take as their source (conceptually or materially) the history of avant-garde moving images. How does the use of one’s favorite Brakhage film as “found” footage change and charge the politics and poetics of appropriation? What are the limits of re-enaction? How does the acknowledgement of a canon within an avant-garde practice impact new makers?”

I’m performing with Rob Gawthrop as part of the Empty Orchestra series of events on the 22nd of October in Birmingham. I’m really excited about it – it’s a performance I’ve been wanting to do for a while that’s an extension of the ‘slow visuals’ I did for Library Tapes a few years ago where I quite literally illustrated the music on a roll of receipt paper in response to Library Tapes’ compositions. This time though I’ll be working in a reflexive, discursive way with Rob.  It’s completely unrehearsed and so we won’t find out whether it’s going to be a matter of Rob playing percussion karaoke or me scribbling furiously to “visualise” what he’s playing as we build up a language over the course of the performance between sound and image. No doubt there will be some tension between the two.

Last time we played together someone in the audience described us as the Laurel and Hardy of improvised electronics and percussion, I took that as a compliment – I’m not sure if Rob did…

Empty Orchestra
Curated by Georgie Park and Samuel Rodgers
13 – 23 October, Eastside Projects Second Gallery

Empty Orchestra is the literal translation of karaoke. This Second Gallery exhibition will be a working lounge bar including new and existing works by Dom Allen, Sophie Lisa Beresford, Stephen Cornford, Petra Cortright, Flat Soufflée, Rob Gawthrop, Christopher Gladwin, Laura James & Samuel Rodgers, Pete McPartlan, Oneohtrix Point Never, Alex Peverett and Gillian Wylde.

Artists will interrogate, dismantle, displace, replace and rebuild the tools and contexts of musical performance. From the use of instruments in extended ways, and playful explorations of audio/visual interferences, to work that abandons precision to embrace ‘shoddiness’, the exhibition brings together the slick and the shabby, the engineered and the experimental.

Performances:

7-8.30pm Saturday 15 October
Jack Harris & Samuel Rodgers /
Robert Curgenven & Katrin Bethge

7-9pm Friday 21 October
Dom Allen / Flat Soufflée /
ICASEA-Yperdimensional Taikyokuken

7-8.30pm Saturday 22 October
Rob Gawthrop + Pete McPartlan

Part of The Event and Supersonic Festival

Looks a lot nicer on vimeo in HD… but it doesn’t loop…

I have about 100 frames for a new video piece – not really sure what the plan is at the moment, just enjoying the process and thinking about the video and audio in tandem. Below is a short test I made using PureData, which I set up to move sound emitting objects around in 3D space with control over how exaggerated the doppler effect is. This is about 8 objects emitting sine waves from a minor chord (the indefinite article, not necessarily A) constantly travelling towards the headphones with their lateral and vertical positions modulated by low frequency sine waves – sounds nicer on headphones.

MINOR SWARM by ~silt~

I have a show next week at Limousine Bull Artist’s Collective in Aberdeen. I’ll be showing new work, mostly drawings that I’ve made over the past year or two that relate to film and video I’ll also be launching the next in the series of Anti-Narrative Comics. More details below:

Static – Pete McPartlan

An exhibition of works about drawing as a time-based medium. Asking how drawing relates to the construction of time, space and motion in other media. Featuring works developed through a materialist understanding of video, film and computing and realised on paper.

Limousine Bull Artists’ Collective
3C Deemouth Business Centre
South Esplanade East
Aberdeen
AB11 9PB

Preview: Friday August 5, 7 – 9pm
Open: Saturday 6 – Sunday 14 August, 11am – 3pm
Closed: Monday and Tuesday

I’m starting to sell a few small pieces of work, via an etsy shop.

The plan is to sell a few small things to help me raise money for more ambitious projects. Up now are two of the studies I made to prepare for making Spoil Ground and the piece you can see above. In the coming weeks I’ll be adding some books, including the new edition of Anti-Narrative Comics which I’m launching at a show in Aberdeen next week and I’ll be adding a whole back catalogue of books and multiples that I’ve built up over the past year or so too.

I’m still not sure whether etsy is a great method of selling work, it has a horrible kitschy image but it seems like a reliable way to handle all the transactions and all that stuff. So any feedback would be really appreciated so I can tweak what I’m doing as I go along.

Also, please share this, it would be really nice to be able to use this as a method to sustain my practice.

The work I started making in these posts is going to be showing at Westgate Studios in Wakefield next Wednesday as part of the Temporary Art Show 3 (part 2). More info below:

Temporary Art Show 3 Part 2

Wednesday 25th May 2011, 5-9pm

Westgate Studios Project Space
Prudential Building
55 Westgate
Wakefield
West Yorkshire
WF1 1BW

For the second installment of Temporary Art Show 3, selected artists and collectives present diverse works of sculpture, installation, drawing, artists’ books and video for one night only.

Sally Barker, Kevin Boniface, Alice Bradshaw & Bob Milner, Andrea Cotton, Marcin Konior, Pui Lee, Lemeh42, Duncan Lister & Bob Milner, Pete McPartlan, Marc Renshaw, Rosanne Robertson, Preben Van der Straete, Jared Szpakowski, WildLand Urban Interface Collective.

Curated by Alice Bradshaw & Bob Milner, Curators in Residence, Westgate Studios Project Space.

I’m thinking a lot about animation at the moment – partly because of all the bits of film I’ve been working with recently and I’ve come to a kind of a conclusion about what it is that interests me about the medium. I’m interested in change rather than motion. Traditionally animation is about defining small slices of time which is a very accurate way in which to build up an illusion of movement. What excites me however is the way in which that is unnecessary, film and video do not need to be constructed of linear representations of things and that using frames for other purposes can create new possibilities and insights into the matter that is filmed, videoed or drawn.

So this tiny loop below and the frames above are an example of how I’m thinking about time as just another axis in which to work on a drawing. I started out with one drawing, then worked on top of it on another sheet, using the previous layer to ‘bounce off’ rather than copy. I see it now as making fairly simple procedural drawings which are fed into a recursive system. The temporal aspect is an analytical tool for understanding each layer’s construction and relationship to the whole – the same drawing process extruded. It’s just the beginning of something but I’m excited about how the process might develop.

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.”