About the artist Pete Ashton

Correct as of May 2024

My name is Pete Ashton. This site is an archive of the work I have made under the umbrella of “Art”, and work I have done in the service of that.

From 2006 to around 2021 I engaged in a multidisciplinary multimedia art practice, creating transformative site-specific work, online and offline. My work used media technologies to explore how we perceive and understand the world around us, from camera obscura lens art to algorithmic image manipulation. I live and work in Birmingham in the North West of Europe with my wife and a pack of rabbits.

I realised I could be an artist in my late 30s and centred my practice on cameras as post-photographic data-capture devices. Like most data-artists I am concerned with identity, privacy and corporate surveillance under late-capitalism and attempt to make work about this that doesn’t simply involve screaming helplessly into the void.

In 2018 I was finally diagnosed autistic at the age of 44, which explained a lot. In particular it made sense of my advocating peer and self-learning and how I use art to look at traditionally academic subjects in new ways, seeing it as a form of applied philosophical enquiry.

As of 2024, this site is again a work in progress as I flesh it out with reflections and archival material. It was an interesting period of my life and it’s time to make some sense of it.