Australian artist Guy Withby, aka WorkbyKnight (WBK), creates portraits of musicians, political figures and other celebrities by assembling hundreds of buttons from computer keyboards, typewriters and phones.
“”The hand made days are gone. Our food, our clothes, our furniture, our homes, our lives are manufactured. Life is factory made.” WBK is factory made art for a manufactured world. With a quite reflection on an analogue past.” This is how Guy Withby describes his works on Deviant Art. You can clearly see that a large part of his art is indeed influenced by the transition from the analog days to the digital era, as he uses old type sets, type writer keys, analogue numbers, analogue timepieces to represent the by-gone analog times, and computer keys, calculator buttons phone buttons to represent the digital age. He manages to arrange all these tiny pieces into detailed portraits of artistic, historical or political personalities who played a role in this transition. Every art piece consists of hundreds of buttons that serve as pixels, and Withby makes sure he uses an assortment of both analog and digital-representing keys, instead of a single type, which would definitely make his job a lot easier. Although his art is time-consuming, the results are nothing short of spectacular.
