TIM BAKER

I am not sure why I tend not to see my digital collages as art – I guess it’s my background as a designer means I tend to see them as functional images – usually for my podcast or mashup covers, rather than say, my traditional watercolours. That doesn’t mean they don’t overlap, or inform/relate to my other work – I quite often use techniques in one medium in another, or mix media, scanning drawings, paintings and my artworks and ‘remixing’ them. So I have posted highlights of my pieces going back over a decade here, and over in a dedicated Digital gallery.

The first sort is me taking a few images – quite often taken by myself but not always, and remixing them. Not sure why the obsession with threes, although podcast 333 is fairly obvious for the Birds of Rhiannon inspired image below. It’s quite hard to express simultaneously ‘near and very far away’ in one 2D image! Also not the only time Rhiannon has appeared in these pieces.

The next sort are what I called Google Collages – I’d use Google Images and search using one term and only use the images that appeared in that search. I’m guessing ‘leftovers’ was the one for this image, but you did get some really random images sometimes, as the Google algorhythm was and still is far from perfect. I’ve stopped doing this sort of collage for obvious reasons: copyright. You can search for license-free/public domain images in Google but it’s far from reliable, so although I still do collages like this, it’s usually using CCZero sites like Pexels and Unsplash.

Shame because I liked the simplicity of one site, one term, the creative limitation gave me some amazing work – but work that I worry about because of said copyright issues. It’s partly why I edited and layered the images so much, was to make it clear I was transforming it and to evade the copyright bots. Anyway I’d never sell these images, they are only digital ones for my own private use. That also might be why a certain car is pixellated out in one of them.

The iTwitch work is based on a real event, at the time I was having real problems with my eyes twitching (search term ‘eyes’), and was really worried. It turned out it was calcium deficiency! And probably stress//too much screen work, but I was getting them at other times, so most likely the calcium. ‘The Long Show’ was a search term of ‘length’ which brought up some really strange stuff. No idea why the fox in Future Perfect Post Present is there – again could be a random search hit.

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A newer and less litigious way of creating images is using Artificial Intelligence like Deep Dream or Big Chill which uses machine learning to create images from scratch. The image above was created from three terms: ‘dark city’ ‘light city’ and ‘light and dark of the city’ which is the title of the piece. So the title creates the art, rather than the other way around! It’s fascinating to play with.

More traditionally I used to do coastal walks around the UK, and take digital photos. I sometimes combined these like ‘Margate Turner’ – probably cos the Turner prize was there – and ‘Weymouth / Drowing In The Sun’. I liked the idea of taking a series of pictures and combining them into one image as a sort of Cubist narrative.

I sometimes drew the images and then combined that digitally with the original image. Here is an image I took in Egypt of the Sphinx combined with drawing and layered. Similarly and more recently I took photos of banners along the River protesting the death of Sarah Everard and what happened at the Clapham Common vigil, and combined them into one piece. It’s interesting how topical a lot of my collages and covers are, ranging from COVID to Brexit, Trump and Royal Weddings, Pride and Censorship.

The ‘Make Art Grate Again’ is actually I think the product of a site where you could type any text on one of those MAGA hats, combined with the very old technology of a detail of one of my oil paintings. If I ever sort out my Dead Trees exhibition, it will be using the song ‘Whispering Grass’, hence the ‘don’t tell it to the trees’

And covers for my albums and mixes come into it too – from Psychodelidisco cover with it’s found images of the Cheshire Cat and glitterballs, to TX1 – an album of my experimental soundwork as ‘reality engine’. This uses as well as text a composited inverted photo of a time-lapse I did in 1992/3 on my degree! Love how the detail of the Victorian doorway glass was preserved.

And then finally a photo of myself, also took during that degree, but similarly remixed and composited with light trails for a rave/acid themed podcast. I suspect I took all the light trail photos used there, it was my thing when I used to go clubbing with my camera.

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