Artist Michael Takeo Magruder has been working with the British Library's digitised collections to produce stunning and thought-provoking artworks for his project, Imaginary Cities. This is an Arts-meets-Humanities research project exploring how large digital repositories of historical cultural materials can be used to create new born-digital artworks and real-time experiences which are relevant and exciting to 21st century audiences.

The project uses images - and the associated metadata - of pre-20th century urban maps drawn from the British Library’s online 1 Million Images from Scanned Books collection on Flickr Commons, and transformed this material into provocative fictional cityscapes. 

Michael was unable to attend the fifth annual British Library Labs Symposium in person, but gave a presentation about his work virtually which you can see here in this video:

Michael was also announced as the winner of the BL Labs Artistic Award 2017 and here is a short clip of him receiving his award via Skype:

(Michael's award is announced at 14 minutes and 30 seconds in to the video.)

If you are inspired to create something with the British Library's collections, find out more on the British Library Labs Awards pages. The deadline this year is midnight BST 11th October 2018. The winners will be announced at our sixth BL Labs symposium on Monday 12 November, 2018.

Posted by BL Labs.