The narrative of the Book of Revelation is not just one of apocalyptic destruction; it is also a journey of salvation and unveiling. The Book's positive culmination is expressed in the creation of a heavenly city – referred to as New Jerusalem – that arises from the remains of the old world.

A New Jerusalem is an immersive virtual reality installation that seeks to embody the spirit of this prophesised city. The artwork manifests as a beautiful and illuminated metropolis that is based upon Revelation’s architectural descriptions, and can be experienced through two distinct perspectives as witnessed and related by the Book's narrator, John the Seer.

Unlike other pictorial visualisations of this biblical prophecy that have been created throughout history, the underlying structure of A New Jerusalem is generated solely from the text of Revelation itself that has been translated into a data code form and rendered in four-dimensional virtual space (XYZ plus time). However, the imagined cityscape is also constructed using current Google Maps data of present day Jerusalem, thus offering the possibility that – in the words of theologian Professor Edward Adams – "the new creation is not a wholly unrecognisable place, even if the new Jerusalem is like no city the world has ever seen". Within this context, the artwork asks viewers to contemplate why we should care about our present society and environment if promises of "a new heaven and a new earth" (Rev 21.1) await us.

Michael Takeo Magruder is a visual artist who works with emerging media including real-time data, digital archives, VR environments, mobile devices, and AI processes. His practice explores concepts ranging from media criticism and aesthetic journalism to digital formalism and computational aesthetics, deploying Information Age technologies and systems to examine our networked, media-rich world.


In the last 25 years, Takeo Magruder’s projects have been showcased in over 300 exhibitions in 35 countries, and his art has been supported by numerous institutions within the UK, US, and EU. In 2010, he represented the UK at Manifesta 8 - the European Biennial of Contemporary Art and several of his most well-known digital artworks were added to the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art. As a Leverhulme Trust artist-in-residence, Takeo Magruder produced De/coding the Apocalypse (Somerset House, 2014), a solo exhibition of contemporary creative visions based on the Book of Revelation. The following year, he was awarded the 2015 Immersive Environments Lumen Prize for his VR installation A New Jerusalem (2014). More recently, Takeo Magruder as developed projects reflecting on current issues surrounding migration in the West including the Syrian Civil War (Lamentation for the Forsaken, 2016) and the US southern border crisis (Zero Tolerance, 2018). As artist-in-residence at the British Library, he researched digital map archives in the One Million Images from Scanned Books collection to create his solo exhibition Imaginary Cities (2019). Takeo Magruder was the first ever artist-in-residence at The National Archives, UK, exploring the institution’s ongoing digital transformation in his solo exhibition [re]Encoding the Archive (2021). During the Covid-19 pandemic, Takeo Magruder was virtual artist-in-residence at the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion in Washington, DC where he investigated social and ethical issues surrounding the international health crisis.