Detour is an online project by Jake Tilson (b. 1958, London) a British artist, graphic designer, writer, and publisher known for his multimedia practice exploring the textures and rhythms of everyday urban life. Working across collage, photography, sculpture, sound, and digital media, his art focuses on overlooked city elements—street signs, food packaging, local dialects, and found objects—revealing poetic and narrative potential in the mundane. Deeply rooted in a sense of place, Tilson draws on travel and personal experience to examine how identity is shaped by environment and ephemera.
Between December 2000 and June 2001, he created Detour, a web-based artwork hosted on Peter Gabriel’s Real World site as part of the Slipstream project. Featuring sound recordings from 25 hotel rooms paired with still images, it echoed the site’s world music ethos, capturing the local within the global. The project extended the tradition of artistic intervention into digital space.
Tilson also produced Tell-Tale Signs for the.year.dot, an online commission using a custom web-crawler called exegesis, he searched all 1,300 words in the Book of Revelation, then looked for real-world businesses matching 127 of the resulting terms. He found and photographed 18 such shop signs worldwide, highlighting uncanny intersections of biblical language and global commerce. Both projects explored the evolving relationship between digital space and contemporary art: Detour captured the sensory texture of place; Tell-Tale Signs unearthed unexpected links between scripture and capitalism.
Visit >> Project Website
Visit >> Artist Website
Tilson studied painting at Chelsea School of Art and earned an MA from the Royal College of Art, later teaching Communication Design there from 1987 to 1999. In the late 1970s, he founded The Woolley Dale Press and published Cipher, a visually rich arts magazine. He continued to explore print culture with Atlas (1985), an experimental multilingual magazine reflecting his fascination with global visual languages. A digital art pioneer, Tilson launched TheCooker in 1994—one of the earliest acclaimed artist websites, blending storytelling, design, and web media. His interdisciplinary practice extends to publishing and the culinary arts. His cookbook A Tale of 12 Kitchens(2006) wove recipes with travel narratives, winning a Gourmand World Cookbook Award and multiple shortlist nominations. In at the Deep End (2011) continued this sensory-rich exploration of food, place, and memory. Audio works like City Picture Fiction (1996) and City Sounds of the Everyday (2012) offer immersive soundscapes that mirror the layered complexity of his visual work.
Tilson’s installations and diorama-based projects—The Terminator Line (New York’s East Village), Excavator–Barcelona, and A Net of Eels (with Kyoichi Tsuzuki)—have been exhibited internationally, merging print, sculpture, and film into immersive environments. His long-form tribute Finding Tsukiji (2008–2023) honors Tokyo’s famed fish market through photographs, collage, and publication-based work. Key exhibitions include a solo retrospective at Museo Internacional de Electrografía (Spain), and group shows at the Venice Architecture Biennale and White Conduit Projects.
Beyond fine art, Tilson is an acclaimed designer and typographer. His work includes signage and typefaces for institutions like the National Theatre, Everyman Theatre (whose neon façade won the RIBA Stirling Prize), Young Vic, and Battersea Arts Centre. He has also collaborated with fashion and design brands, creating footwear for Paul Smith and clothing for Warehouse. His work is held in major public collections including Tate (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and MoMA (New York).
Detour and Tell-Tale Signs were commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, with support from Arts Council England’s New Media Fun
