Frederick Baker

Frederick Baker

Frederick Douglas Stephan "Fred" Baker (born 26 January 1965) is an Austrian-British filmmaker, media scholar, and archaeologist.

He was born in Salzburg and was brought up in London. After graduating from Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School for Boys, he studied Anthropology and Archaeology at St John’s College, Cambridge, Tübingen and Sheffield Universities, finishing with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University.

He is a Senior Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University, specialising in Digital Humanities, Heritage, and Prehistoric Rock Art. He is a co-founder of the EU-funded 3D Pitoti digital heritage project and co-director of the Cambridge University Prehistoric Picture Project.

He divides his time between London, Berlin and Vienna, producing and directing films, as well as writing articles and books. In the book The Art of Projectionism (2007) he defined a projectionist school of filmmaking and media art. In this publication he also presented "ambient film", a surround experience that can be shown in specially developed "ambient cinemas". His first narrative ambient short, Ruhetag, was premiered in Vienna in 2007. Ring Road: A Viennese Odyssey, the first ambient feature film, was premiered at the Biennale in Seville in 2008.

His interview partners include Yoko Ono, George H. W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Shimon Peres, Helmut Kohl, John Major, Michel Rocard, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Amalia Rodrigues, Cardinal Franz König, Lord Norman Foster, Sir Ernst Gombrich, Simon Wiesenthal, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, Joseph Stalin’s grandson and Vivienne Westwood.

Baker has taught film at the Donau University, Krems and St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences in Austria. He has lectured on film, media and journalism at the Bauhaus University, Weimar, the Universität der Künste in Berlin and Middlesex University in London. He currently teaches film as part of the Screen Media and Culture Group at Cambridge University. His specialties include cinema of Austria, new media art and television documentary.