Pete McPartlan

Last Name: 
McPartlan
First Name: 
Pete

Pete McPartlan is an artist and experimental musician working with generative music software,soldering iron, vhs tapes, a pen and scraps of paper. Pete graduated form Hull School of Art in 2004. As an artist he has installed paper based work > performed live lo-fi video stuff > and plays and records music under various aliases and has improvised with various Hull based collectives and also writes a nano-circulation fanzine "The Pitchforke." I am an artist and experimental musician working with generative music software, soldering iron, VHS tapes, a pen and scraps of paper. I graduated from Hull School of Art in 2004 and have been living and working in Hull, UK since then. My work is concerned with the aesthetics and culture of redundant technology. I am interested in video, not for its representational abilities but for its aesthetic and material qualities and for it as a system. Structuralists film makers of the 60s/70s sought to highlight celluloid's properties, emphasising surface, shadow and grain similarly I'm interested in idea of magnetic materialism, amplifying flaws and oddities inherent in the technology to expand outwards into the realm of the aesthetic and poetic. Most recently I have been using a process where I pick up the em field from CRT TVs and amplify it to create live video performances and short video pieces. These performances combine and confuse the auditory and the visual, making stripped down, abstract, expanded cinematic works. I also work in a curatorial role developing projects and screenings on a low budget centred on the (now disappearing) video aesthetic, under the name "The 2 Mile Quadruplex". Named after an old video format, the current project is to document old independent video shops before cease to exist. See www.quadruplex.co.uk for more info. www.petemcpartlan.co.uk