Real-time virtual environment (Unity3D) with soundscape (Flash) Variable, infinite duration with Drew Baker (3D visualisation & programming)

This installation is a real-time virtual ‘city’ exclusively created from an early urban map of New York City found in the British Library’s One Million Images from Scanned Books collection on Flickr Commons. The 3D environment is algorithmically rendered anew each day from a 2D ‘map’ that is being constantly regenerated by the project’s online server application. The synthetic world shifts according to a hyperreal day/night cycle and offers two primary viewpoints. The first is a randomly animated vista of the city’s skyline, whilst the second is a floating street-view perspective that is experienced through an Oculus VR headset. An atmospheric soundscape (also generated in real time) completes the experience.

Exhibitions

Enter Through The Headset 4, Gazelli Art House, London, UK (2019)
Imaginary Cities: Michael Takeo Magruder, The British Library, London, UK (2019)

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.